Locale Kit: the big picture

Blog post by PulkoMandy on Sat, 2009-06-27 19:14
, ,

almost-UML diagram of the locale kitalmost-UML diagram of the locale kit

This week, I finally got the plaintext catalog add on working. Then today, Oliver reviewed my work and we had a meeting on IRC. We agreed on some changes to the internal architecture of the locale kit, and also to the classes I added. Some classes in this kit have unappropriate names, and the kit was designed with zeta compatibility in mind, whereas in today's Be-World it seems more important to focus on gettext. I summarized our meeting in this somewhat-UML diagram. It's not really an UML object diagram as I added informations about the workflow and the tools to use when working on a localized application, and a lot of notes and remarks. I think it shows well the status of the kit: a clearly designed API, but some missing code and a lot of TODO notes. I did not fully reported the parameters of the methods and the attributes of all the classes, look at the headers if you need some information on that. This diagram is not meant as a technical reference, but as a colourful and efficient way of cleaning up my personal notes. I think I'm better at organizing my tought in a spacial way than laying them down linearly in a text. Click on the image to enjoy it at full size :)

Comments

Re: Locale Kit: the big picture

by dracul - 2009-06-27 22:07

Great job!
In the BCountry class could you put a function for country-flags (BBitmap or HVIF).

Re: Locale Kit: the big picture

by PulkoMandy - 2009-06-27 22:35

Yes, that would nicely fit there and it would look nice in the locale preflet.
I added that to my notebook :)

Re: Locale Kit: the big picture

by BiPolar - 2009-06-29 13:10

Some flags for you:
http://www.famfamfam.com/lab/icons/flags/

:)

Re: Locale Kit: the big picture

by Suk Choi - 2009-06-30 17:46

Great job!!

Re: Locale Kit: the big picture

by hitech - 2009-07-05 03:39

Please take into account that the week starting day is different in different countries. I think, you can add it into BCountry class.

Besides, would you support other calendar formats, like Hebrew Lunar or Arabic Lunar? Even though adding the calendars themselves is a tough task which is definetly not the highest priority, you may want to reserve a plugin placeholder for date localizations and conversions. Also, if you choose to do that, remember that the calendar is not strictly corresponding to a country: we in Israel primarily use standard Gregorian calendar, reserving Hebrew Lunar to holidays and special occasions.

I think it will be a good idea to provide somewhere a stub for the calendar date-mapping function like getDate(CalendarFrom, CalendarTo, input), with some kind of a plugin library which will perform the actual calculation. CalendarFrom and CalendarTo may be enums, and "input" - a string in a well-described format.

Re: Locale Kit: the big picture

by PulkoMandy - 2009-07-05 08:08

The calendar management is handled by ICU. I will look at what they have done and probably make it transparent, ie use directly their API. As I've not started the ICU part yet, I'll make a blogpost when I will be looking at these problems.