Java Support for Internationalization

Internationalization required several changes to the Java language. With early versions of the Java language, writing internationalized code required extra effort and was substantially more difficult than writing myopic code. Latest versions of the Java language seek to make writing internationalized code easier than its locale-specific counterpart . Internationalization support mainly comes from the following three packages:

• java.util ” Includes the Locale, TimeZone, and ResourceBundle classes. A Locale class encapsulates certain information about a locale, but does not provide the actual locale-specific operations. Rather, affected methods can now be passed a Locale object as a parameter that will alter their behavior. If no Locale is specified, a default Locale is taken from the environment. This package also provides support for ResourceBundles, objects that encapsulate locale-sensitive data in a portable, independent way.

• java.io ” All the classes in java.io that worked with InputStreams and OutputStreams have corresponding classes that work with class Reader and Writer. Readers and Writers work like Streams, except they are designed to handle 16-bit Unicode characters instead of 8-bit bytes.

• java.text ” A package that provides support for manipulating various kinds of text. This includes collating (sorting) text, formatting dates and numbers , and parsing language-sensitive data.