When your goal is to design a Web application that can be used anywhere in the world, a myriad of development issues appear, such as:
These are a few of the questions that arise when the LitWare developers begin designing a localizable Performance Tracking (PT) application.
The specifications for the PT application, described in Planning the Globalized PT Application, require that the application be localized for Germany, Japan, and the United States and that the application be usable in two arenas—a hardware store and a generic training center. Understanding and Deploying Arenas describes how you change arenas and install multiple arenas. The PT application has two parts: the PT User application, which individuals, evaluators, and auditors use, and the PT Admin application, which administrators use. Because only the PT Admin application is being implemented in this scenario, this discussion does not include the PT User application. The PT Admin application's user-services, business-services, and data-services tiers all contain localized elements.
Designing the PT Application Localizable User Interface describes how the design team created the PT application's user interface so that it can be localized by locale on the fly. Localizing the user interface includes:
Because Japan, Germany, and the United States format times, dates, and numeric data differently, this data must be transformed when it is transferred to and from the user interface. A COM component on the business-services tier handles the formatting differences between the user's preferences and the Microsoft® SQL Server™ installation on which the Eval database resides. About the Formats Component, Formats Methods and Declarations, and Converting a Recordset to XML describe the PT application's COM component that uses the national language support API (NLSAPI) to format locale-sensitive data.
The PT application's SQL Server database stores information in any language and alphabet. Globalizing the Eval Database describes how the design team achieved this capability. In addition, to effectively support users from different countries and regions, the application provides translated message text. Localized Messages from lingo.xml describes how the PT application delivers localized message text.