On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 5:23 PM, Thoka <[email protected]> wrote:
> We've been building GWT application for about 3 years now, and we've
> reached the point where compiling the internationalization strings
> into the WAR file is no longer servicable. Today the GWT I18N support
> is primarly based on Constants and Messages which is solely built on
> Java property files.
>
> How ever, we've solved this issue by putting the internationalization
> settings on the server side and by fetching these strings remotely via
> JavaScript documents. This works perfect, as we now are able to (even
> in live environment) change internationalization files without re-
> compiling the entire project and without even restarting the tomcat
> service.
>
Realize the big cost you are paying:
@DefaultMessage("You have {0,number,#,##0}
items totaling {0,number,currency}")
@PluralText({"one", "You have 1 item costing {0,number,currency}"})
String getCartTotal(@PluralCount int items, double total);
Gets converted into essentially the following:
String getCartTotal(int items, double total) {
switch (DefaultRule.select(items)) {
case 1: return "You have 1 item totaling "
+ NumberFormat.getCurrencyFormat().format(total);
default: return "You have " +
NumberFormat.getFormat("#,##0").format(items)
+ " items totalling " +
NumberFormat.getCurrencyFormat().format(total);
}
}
And things get inlined/optimized from there. If you were to fetch the
format strings from the server at runtime, you would have to include code to
parse the format string in the runtime as well. That code gets large --
which is why String.format isn't currently included in GWT's JRE emulation.
If you wanted to allow the server strings to have plural support, then you
even have to add extra work in the client and download multiple format
strings for each message.
Having to deploy a new compiled application when you make changes to
translations doesn't seem a large cost compared to the huge savings by doing
more work at compile time rather than at runtime.
Much of the work on GWT is to be able to do more things at compile time
rather than runtime and this is a good example.
--
John A. Tamplin
Software Engineer (GWT), Google
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http://groups.google.com/group/Google-Web-Toolkit-Contributors
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