Java was designed to support internationalization. All strings in Java are stored internally as Unicode strings, which normally are transparent to the programmer. However, when your program has to support a language such as Japanese or Chinese, you must use Unicode.
One of the most common reasons for making a program international is the need to display the program's data in a variety of languages. JSTL provides several tags that make it easy to create a multilingual program. In this chapter, we show you how to make our forum example from Chapter 7 work with multiple languages.