David Jones has suggested in the past that we start moving away from using properties files for UI
labels and such, and use XML files instead. That subject has come up again in
https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-1425.
I would be interested in helping out with the implementation, but I'd like to get input from the
developer community first.
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Here are some of the suggestions David made:
"If we do something like that, here or anywhere, we should use XML and not properties files. XML is
about 1E6 times better than properties files (name/value pairs) for organizing this sort of
information. It is hierarchical so much easier to organize and you can use real UTF-8 characters
there instead of having to encode everything and use a special tool or a translator to work on the
files."
and
"In XML there are standard ways of doing this, namely using the xml:lang attribute on an element to
specify the language of the content in an element."
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I have been thinking about this for a while, and I was picturing a refactoring of the resource
handling code so that it can read xml files in addition to *.properties files. The file format would
be invisible from a programmer's perspective. In other words, the method call
UtilProperties.getPropertyValue("SomeResource", "SomeProperty") would still work even if the
"SomeResource" resource was in an XML file.
Or we can just have a utility to retrieve resources from an XML file.
Regardless of how the properties are retrieved, we still need to come up with a strategy (or schema)
for the xml file format. I'm not an XML guru, so this is one area where I could use some help.
Do we continue to keep each language in a separate file or should we have all properties for all
languages in a single file?
Are there any other issues anyone can think of?
Comments welcome.
-Adrian
