[Rails-core] Localization ideas/proposal

Sascha Ebach
Tue, 08 Nov 2005 00:39:46 -0000

Hi Tobias,

couldn''t restrain myself. I was only going to lurk here, but
I''d like to
comment on that.

> Localization is application and requirement specific. I believe that a
> plugin would be the right place for such code.
> There could be a rails endorsed Localization plugin if there will be a
> generally agreed upon golden way to do it of course...

Access to databases is application and requirement specific, too. I think
that both solutions have to be considered. Also, when someone comes and
says this one solution is good and the other one chimes in with no I think
*this* is better, usually a combination of both can be most beneficial :)

As I see it, there are some conventions which have to be adapted and
excercised by the core developers. Like when having methods spitting out
dates one has to think about the rest of the world. Although mainly
translations of error messages and other potential strings in core Rails.

This would be _really_ easy, as Rails has only a select few places to
change. Dummy functions would have to be created. All in all, this is maybe
an hour worth of work.

Any other way the package maintainer will have to stay in sync, which just
cries out for DRY.

Also, I think that some other stuff should be near to the core. Preferably
all time and currency related stuff. Although, for this another Module
might be fine. ActiveLocalization, ActionI18n, ActiveLanguages anyone?
Other stuff, like harvesters, file format definitions etc. for example
could be put into plugins. Although, I must say, when I look into what
James Adams does with Rails Engines[1] it will probably be possible to do
most of it as a plugin.

Sascha Ebach

PS: Tobias, in case you were wondering about my integration of Ri18n into
Typo. Since I never was able to get in contact with the maintainer I
finally gave up after 3 weeks of working on it. Ri18n is GPL and as such
not viable for integration into Typo. Since all attempts of contacting the
author have failed I finally gave up. Now I have to use Wordpress for my
projects :(what a mess...) I''d much rather not start again with the
whole
process, but try to actually help with implementing this into Rails core.

http://svn.berlios.de/viewcvs/ri18n/trunk/
Sadly looks like the repo hasn''t been touched in 6 months.

[1] http://rails-engines.rubyforge.org/