IBM Globalization Tool for Eclipse

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What is the IBM Globalization Tool for Eclipse?

Globalization has been identified as a critical component for success in the e-business marketplace. E-business "on demand" challenges developers to deliver software solutions and components in multilingual forms in order to address the global reality. At IBM, for example, it was discovered that many newly-acquired software products written in Java™ and originally designed for English users needed to be globalized in order to meet IBM globalization standards. Therefore, developers must now take great pains to globalize their legacy source code so that any particular instance of software, executed on a single server or end-user machine, can process multilingual data input and present culturally-correct responses in a multicultural environment such as the Internet. Meeting these requirements is often difficult without appropriate tools.

The IBM Globalization Tool for Eclipse (IGT, also known as the Globalization plug-in or Globalize String) can provide the following benefits when globalizing J2EE applications:

• The tool saves 80% of the time required to extract a hard-code string from the source code.
• It saves approximately half of the time required for assisting developers in applying changes in all relevant files.
• It provides sample interfaces to handle the translation of exception and log messages based on dynamic locales (that is, the developers can customize the interfaces for various globalization designs).
• It is compatible with both Eclipse 3.0/3.1 and IBM Enterprise development IDE (RAD) installations.

This tool is particularly suitable for large global companies seeking to integrate themselves with smaller companies' products that are not yet globalized.

How does it work?

Compared to the supplied Eclipse plug-in from the Java Development Toolkit (JDT), the IBM Globalization Tool for Eclipse not only extends the functions of extracting hard-coded strings, modifying the code, and creating properties, but also provides a middle layer (ResourceEntry) to handle the client's locale, generate responses for different users, and produce a multilingual log. IGT allows for an instance of the service-oriented application to be bound with the client's locale in order to present multilingual data using an object of the collection class (XXResources) automatically. In short, it is an ideal way to help developers handle run-time exception messages specific to the run-time locale in their J2EE applications.