Internationalization & resource bundle spec

[James Falkner <james.falkner@sun.com>]

All,

In today's (and last week's) concall, we decided to adopt the
java style of resolving the names of resource bundles in an
internationalized environment.  The SDD schema has a way of
identifying resource bundles, but our spec must also give rules
about what those resource bundle identifiers are and how to
resolve the base names into physical resources in runtimes.

We have decided to adopt the mechanism that is used on the
Java platform for resource bundle lookups.  For example,
when the base name is "ButtonLabel", and the current locale
is fr_CA_UNIX, then the following order is used to locate
resource bundles:

ButtonLabel_fr_CA_UNIX
ButtonLabel_fr_CA
ButtonLabel_fr
ButtonLabel_en_US
ButtonLabel_en
ButtonLabel

This is described in detail in the Java Platform API documentation.
The latest release, j2se 1.5.0 (aka Java 5, don't ask why :-))
contains the "ResourceBundle" java class, whose API documentation
is found here:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/ResourceBundle.html#getBundle(java.lang.String,%20java.util.Locale,%20java.lang.ClassLoader)

The suffixes added as in the example above are "country code",
"language code", and "language variant".  These tokens
come from standard ISO specifications, and pointers to the
ISO documents can be found in Java's "Locale" class
API documentation at:

http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/docs/api/java/util/Locale.html

-jhf-