Patent Grant
6882353
The present invention relates to the selection and control of localization settings for internationalized software applications and more particularly, to the transmission of locale information among processes, components and systems within computer networks. A computer system, a computer implemented method and a computer program are provided to implement locale information for such software applications.
In order for an application program to be practically useful it must be capable of presenting information which reflects cultural preferences (language and conventions) for the users of the application program. Typically, the cultural preference of information provided by an application program is customized for a specific market (geographical region or country). ISO/IEC 9945-1:1990 (IEEE Standard 1003.2-1990) Information Technology-portable Operating System Interface (pOSIX™) Shell and Utilities was established to provide a vehicle for the development of portable application programs. IEEE Standard 1003.1 describes a set of basic system services for input/output, file system access, and process management to be used in the development of application programs. The standard also defines an interface accessible from the C programming language, which provides access to these services and establishes standard semantics and syntax. This interface allows application program developers to write portable applications in the C programming language.
In compliance with IEEE Standard 1003.1, IEEE Standard 1003.2 was developed to facilitate the internationalization of applications which did not require the application program developer to customize the application program for each cultural market. IEEE Standard 1003.2 defines a source code level interface to shell services and common utilities which is independent of IEEE Standard 1003.1. An extension of this standard is the User portability Extension (UpE) (IEEE Standard 1003.2a) that addresses interactive terminal-oriented utilities such as full screen editors.
The IEEE Standards 1003.2 and 1003.2a are based on a “locale” model which provides the binding methodology for combining user preferences for language and conventions with the functions of the internationalized application program at run-time. The locale model describes the user's language or conventions to the application program and conveys it to the application at run-time so that the data is processed and presented correctly according to the needs of the user.
The locale model defines six categories of cultural variables, which are collectively referred to as “locale categories”. The locale categories are:
Details of these variables can be found in the aforementioned standards which are hereby incorporated by reference.
The locale developer specifies values to each of the locale categories which particularize the type of formatting to be applied to the data to be processed or presented. For example, possible values for the locale category “monetary formatting” would be that for the United States, Germany or France which would result in the monetary data being formatted to be processed or presented according to the currency of the specified country (i.e. dollars, deutsche marks or francs, respectively). When the six locale categories are assigned specific values, they are collectively referred to as a “locale”. The mentioned locale categories are referenced by the internationalized application program as that program is executed.
Additional background information for this subject matter, particularly for the notion and use of “locales” and internationalized application programs, is provided in the following patents, all assigned to International Business Machines Corporation and hereby incorporated by reference.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,768, entitled “Computer Operating System providing Means for Formatting Information in Accordance with Specified Cultural preferences”, issued Nov. 10, 1998;
U.S. Pat. No. 5,907,326, entitled “System and Method for Updating Cultural Profiles with Dragging and Dropping Locale Objects”, issued May 25, 1999;
U.S. Pat. No. 5,900,871, entitled “System and Method for Managing Multiple Cultural Profiles in an Information Handling System”, issued May 4, 1999.
While the above standards provide a vehicle to generate internationalized application programs that enable users to vary the cultural sensitivity of the programs, their use has been cumbersome particularly when network communication in multiple locales is desired. Concurrent communication of information involving multiple locales is hindered by the necessity of the communication of long file names to distinguish between different locales or the transportation of large locale objects themselves on the network. Further, industry locale naming conventions that use mixed case alphabetics to differentiate between different locales are not supported on all platforms and the use of the long file names to differentiate between different locale names are not supported across all file systems.
It has been previously suggested on pages 197 and 198 of the August 1996 issue of the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin to incorporate defined triplets of language, country and encoding identifiers into a single hexadecimal representation known as a locale token. The locale token is compact and precise in its use and definition of the locale information it represents. While the use of a locale token, as described in the above article, is an improvement over previous techniques, it has been proven inadequate in providing locale environment identification and locale version control.
Therefore, it is an object of the present invention to provide a mechanism for locale environment identification and locale version control.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a locale correlator for identification and transmission of locale information within and among processes, components and systems.
It is another object of the invention to minimize the amount of data that must be transmitted to communicate locale information within and among processes, components and systems.
In accordance with the present invention a three part locale identification triplet is provided. The identifier includes a table identifier (Table ID), locale version identifier (Locale Version ID) and a locale token identifier (Locale Token ID). The Locale Token ID is the only mandatory identifier in the triplet and addresses the need to uniquely identify the desired localization specifications through a concise unambiguous hexadecimal format. The Locale Version ID addresses the need to allow multiple variations of the locale specification to be defined for a given “root” locale called for by the Locale Token ID, and the Table ID addresses the need to provide a mechanism to identify and distinguish a particular instance of a locale identified by the Locale Token ID or the combination of the Locale Token and Locale Version ID's or to reference a user provided reference table.
In accordance with one aspect of the disclosed invention there is provided a computer implemented method for use of an internationalized version of a software application with a plurality of cultural preferences, the method comprises providing a plurality of locales each for customizing the international software application to one of the cultural preferences wherein said locales are stored and accessible at a plurality of storage locations, and using multiple part identifiers for accessing the locales, one identifier for each of the locales. Each identifier has a required part for identifying a root locale, and at least one first optional part for identifying one or more variations of the root locale, each provides a different cultural preference of the root locale, and a second optional part for identifying a particular instance of the locale identified by the required part of the identifier or both the required and first parts of the identifier, and using at least one lookup table for obtaining the particular locale instance.
In accordance with another aspect of the invention, there is provided a computer system comprising a computer network with one or more computers and a server containing an internationalized program for use with a plurality of cultural preferences, the program contains software for a plurality of locales each for customizing the international program to one of the cultural preferences wherein said locales are stored and accessible at a plurality of storage locations of the server. Software is included for multiple part identifier for selection of a requested locale from a computer of the network having one identifier for each of the locales. The identifiers have a required hexadecimal field for identifying a root locale, and at least one of a first optional part containing a hexadecimal field for identifying one or more variations of the root locale, each variation provides a different cultural preference of the root locale, and a second optional part containing a hexadecimal field for identifying a particular instances of the locale identified using the required hexadecimal field.
According to a further aspect of the disclosed invention there is provided a computer program on a computer usable medium wherein said program comprises program software for an internationalized version of a software application for use with a plurality of cultural preferences. Software is included for responding to a plurality of locales each for customizing the international software application to one of the cultural preferences, said locales being stored and accessible at a plurality of storage locations. Software is also included for multiple field identifiers, one identifier for each of the locales wherein said identifiers have a required digitally encoded field for identifying a root locale, and at least one of a first optional digitally encoded field for identifying one or more variations of the root locale, each variation to provide a different cultural preference of the root locale, and a second optional digitally encoded field for identifying a particular instance of the locale identified by the required field of the identifier.
The present invention with its advantages and objects can best be understood from the following description of an embodiment while referring to the accompanying figures of which:
The present invention is for use in connection with any properly configured general purpose computer system either standing alone or in a network of computers. An example of a general purpose computer is shown in FIG. 1. Such a computer system 100 includes a processing unit (CpU) 102 connected by a bus 101 to a random access memory 104, a high density storage device 108, a keyboard 106, a display 110 and a mouse 112. A modem 117 is provided to connect the computer system 100 to a network 113 through a standard telephone connection 119. The network includes one or more servers 120 and other computers 122 and 124.
In accordance with the present invention, a three part locale identification triplet is provided to enable the locale developer to specify values for each of the locale categories of an internationalized software application usable with computer systems and networks, such as those shown in FIG. 1. The software application can be for placement in the computer system 100 or can be located in the server 120 or another computer 122 or 124 of the network 113. The application program can be provided to the computer by way of magnetic or electro-optic medium 126 or 128, or by way of the electromagnetic medium of the network 113.
As shown in
The triplet 200 containing the Table ID, Locale Version ID and Locale Token ID may be referred to as a “codon”. The term codon is used herein to refer to the concatenation of the three 16-bit identifier values as a single entity.
The Locale Token ID is an assigned value for a unique combination of values representing the language, country and a coded character set identifier (CCSID). The Locale Token ID is a shorthand notation for a locale string that is identified under the column heading “Long Name” in FIG. 3. The Locale Token ID cannot be algorithmically decomposed to yield three separate elements. The decomposition of the Locale Token ID requires a table lookup. (See the above referenced U.S. Pat. No. 5,835,768).
The architected ranges for the 16 bit Locale Token ID are:
The Locale Version ID is a reference to a particular variation of a locale identified by the Locale Token ID. As discussed hereinafter, the Locale Version ID is used to signal not just a variance but what type of variance as well. It differentiates one particular instance from another, for example, a base locale compared to the same locale with a modified collation specification (see
The architected ranges for the 16-bit Locale Version ID are:
The Table ID is a specific reference to an instance of a system resource supporting a plurality of system tables designed to manage these token resources.
The architected ranges for the 16-bit Table ID are:
As an example to illustrate an application of the codon,
The “Table ID” column is for a 16-bit number identifying the specific instance of a system resource table to be used by the locale correlation methods.
The “Locale Version ID” column is for a 16-bit number identifying the specific version instance of a locale resource to be used by the locale correlation methods.
The “Locale Token ID” column is for a 16-bit number identifying the specific locale resource to be used by the locale correlation methods.
The locale resources and resource tables to provide the specific version of a locale resource and the specific instance of a system resource table are made available by the operating system of the platform or network on which the application is deployed.
The next six columns represent the cultural preferences identified by the codon where:
The “Language ID” column is for a two character alphabetic code identifying a language using ISO-639 assigned values.
The “Country ID” column is for a two character alphabetic code identifying a country using ISO-3166 assigned values.
The “CCSID” column contains a coded character set identifier which is a 16-bit number identifying a specific set of encoding scheme identifier, character set identifier(s), code page identifier(s) and additional coding related required information that uniquely identifies the coded graphic character representation used.
These three values, namely “Language ID”, “Country ID” and “CCSID” are synthesized into the “Locale Token ID” as previously described.
The “CS ID” column contains the character set identifier which identifies the specific graphic character set being used.
The “CP ID” column contains a code page identifier which identifies a specification of code points from a defined coding structure for each graphic character in a set or in a collection of graphic character sets where each code point can only have one specific meaning.
The “Long Name” column contains a character string identifying the locale specification used following industry standard POSIX/XPG4 conventions.
The “Comment” column contains free form text providing additional information about the associated entry.
The entries in each row in
In each of the top three rows of both
In the topmost row, the Locale Token ID is “1C2A”. This represents a locale with the characteristics identified by the headings of the six columns to the right of the locale token ID. Those six columns contain the following information about the locale:
The seventh column, Comment, provides textual information, is not part of the locale and describes the locale as using the EBCDIC encoding scheme, Latin-1 characters and the English language.
In the second row of both
The seventh column, Comment, provides textual information, is not part of the locale, and describes the locale as using the EBCDIC encoding scheme, Latin-1 characters with the addition of the EURO currency symbol.
In the third row in both
The seventh column, Comment, provides textual information, is not part of the locale, and describes the locale as using the EBCDIC encoding scheme, Latin-1 characters and the French language.
Unlike the previously described three rows, in the fourth row of
Once the desired codon has been selected, the computer performs the following steps:
The first two steps shown in
If the requested Locale Token ID is found, obtain the Long Name and initiate a load of the locale object resources from the Ids or from the locale services available from the operating system. Use the resultant load information (addressability to the in-memory locale specifications) to process the data as requested and end the process (step 534).
Above we have described one embodiment of the invention. Those skilled in the art may determine that a number of changes may be made in that embodiment without departing from the spirit and scope of the invention. Therefore it should be understood that the present invention is not limited to the above described embodiment but includes those covered by the spirit and scope of the appending claims.
| Number | Date | Country | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2343496 | Apr 2001 | CA | national |
| Number | Name | Date | Kind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5613122 | Burnard et al. | Mar 1997 | A |
| Number | Date | Country | |
|---|---|---|---|
| 20030179225 A1 | Sep 2003 | US |
