Another trend we've been seeing recently is the need to internationalize Notes, or in most cases, Domino applications. We have a lot of clients with an international presence--most of them, really--but until recently almost everything they did was in English.

That seems to be changing.

Suddenly we are getting RFQs for internationalizing existing applications, some of which we originally built, some of which we didn't. We recently completed a nice internationalization project for a major retailer (you'd know them) and are getting ready to do the same for a very large chemical company which needs its applications converted into 11 languages.

It could be we're being asked to do this because it has become a bit of a specialty for us, or maybe it's simply because of our existing business relationships. In some cases it's both, of course.

We've found a really great way to internationalize Domino web applications which lets us make both the forms and the views change text based on the user's computer's Regional Settings. We're not translating the text users type in, of course (that's only about 80% accurate when machine-translated) but we can make it so a single application can work for almost any number of individual languages.

The tricky part here is getting the views to play along. It's relatively straightforward to make forms change static text and drop-down lists (although Action Buttons and other button labels are a little more interesting to make automatically change).

Views are less cooperative. They can't really change values dynamically because, well, that's how views are. You can't, for instance, do an @DbLookup from a view to get text from a new language. Nor can you access Profile documents. Views don't want to be that dynamic because being dynamic means the view's index is pretty much worthless and has to be deleted and rebuilt. That's the problem with using things like @Now in a view...it is always changing, causing the view to constantly rebuild its index. Very inefficient.

The typical solution for internationalization of views has been to build a set for each language, but that's slow, inefficient, and expensive, too. And, when you have lots of different languages, makes for a really bloated database. Not a good solution.

As it turns out, there actually is a way to make web views dynamic with regard to regional languages. It's this technology (sorry, can't say) that we're using in our internationalization projects. The result is databases which can be updated simply through configuration. That is, without any programming. Fill out a form, get another language in your application. That makes it much faster, easier and, best of all, cheaper, to add languages to a much-used system.

Do you have an application that needs internationalized? Drop me an e-mail or give me a call at 614-457-7100 ext 200 and let's discuss it.

No documents found