Markus,
A year and a half ago I started implementing ICU on Linux and Solaris
systems. The problem was that these systems don't have native UTF-16
support. They needed either UTF-8 or UTF-32 support. Because this was a
combination of a PHP extension and C web code I started out with adding
UTF-8 support. I have added UTF-32 support for 4 byte wchar_t systems.
Originally this was code that I used as part of my tool kit to help my
clients add ICU support. Part of my effort was developing ICU internal code
that I submitted for inclusion in ICU. Starting with ICU 1.8.1 there is
enough of the functionality in ICU proper that I can package this code for
developers to use as a starting point to add ICU support to new and existing
applications.
As an i18n consultant I have see that projects that succeed do so when the
entire development staff feels comfortable with the i18n tools. This code
may be more limited but it is easier for the typical programmer to use. If
you need the full power of ICU it is still available to you.
I figure that making this free open source that it might bring me some
consulting business. On the other hand, if they feel comfortable
implementing the code themselves they probably would not use my services
anyway, but I might get a referral.
In this economy I also figure that if I can reduce that cost of implementing
Unicode it will stimulate business and provide more work for all of us.
Carl
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]On Behalf Of Markus Kuhn
> Sent: Saturday, September 08, 2001 12:25 PM
> To: linux-utf8; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: xIUA makes ICU C development more developer friendly
>
>
> Sounds useful ...
>
> Markus
>
>
> ------- Forwarded Message
> From: "Carl W. Brown" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
> Subject: xIUA makes ICU C development more developer friendly
> Date: Sat, 8 Sep 2001 11:22:26 -0700
>
> This should be of special interest to Linux users who generally prefer
> UTF-32 or UTF-8 Unicode.
>
> X.Net, Inc. now provides complementary software that can make implementing
> ICU http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/ much easier for many types of
> applications. It uses much more familiar APIs. For example to
> collate you
> use xiua_strcoll. The xiua_strtok is actually thread safe. It
> will convert
> strftime formats to ICU formats using the ICU locale resources.
>
> X.Net's xIUA http://www.xnetinc.com/xiua/ is an Open Source,
> cross-platform,
> thread safe, starter package to implement ICU Unicode support. It is
> specifically designed to make it easier to retrofit existing code for ICU
> support by providing locale management so that users do not have to modify
> internal calling interfaces to pass locale parameters. It also provides
> support for legacy code page data so that you can migrate to Unicode. It
> also extends ICU to support UTF-8 and UTF-32 forms of Unicode in
> addition to
> the native UTF-16 ICU support.
>
> The xIUA package is especially attractive to Web developers. It contains
> special code to simplify Internet development. It provides
> useful functions
> such as browser Accept-Language parsing to select the best
> character set to
> use for any specific locale. Other enhancements allow you to
> automatically
> use special characters that are not a part of the character set. For
> example, many browsers do not support the new iso-5589-15
> character set with
> the Euro sign. This allows you to continue to use the old iso-5589-1 and
> still display the Euro symbol by employing special HTML/XML encoding.
>
> Another very useful feature allows a single thread to support a browser
> using the Japanese Shift_JIS character set and access Unix
> Japanese HTML or
> XML files encoded in EUC-JP plus use a database that has Unicode UTF-16
> data. This code is not only easy to write but in the next
> request the same
> code may be supporting a browser using UTF-8 encoding and fetching Chinese
> GB18030 encoded HTML. This is accomplished my supporting Unicode UTF-32,
> UTF-16 and UTF-8 data as well as most common forms of legacy code
> page data
> with the same application code. It also makes it easy for different parts
> of an application to operate with independent encodings yet it is
> simple for
> these sections of code to exchange data. It will transform the data if
> needed and copy it if the data is in the same format.
>
> The big advantage of xIUA it that it allows you to tap into the full
> richness of ICU which is probably the most powerful cross platform Unicode
> and locale support systems available.
>
> __________________________________________________________________
> __________
> Carl W. Brown - President X.Net, Inc.
>
> ------- End of Forwarded Message
>
> -
> Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
> Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
-
Linux-UTF8: i18n of Linux on all levels
Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-utf8/
