Section 11.7. International Components for Unicode (ICU)
11.7. International Components for Unicode (ICU)The International Components for Unicode (ICU) activity is driven by major software companies, but it involves voluntary work too and is based on the open source principle. The ICU software consists of components (subroutines, modules) that are available as source code and portable to different operating systems. ICU is often characterized as a "project," but by its nature, it has to be a continuous activity, to keep up with the development of the Unicode standard and related specifications. Originally released (in 1999) as "IBM Classes for Unicode" and still substantially supported by IBM and other vendors, ICU has become the first choice for building software that works with Unicode data, when possible. ICU was originally written in Java, and later support to C and C++ has been added. The Java version is called ICU4J, and the C and C++ version is ICU4C . The official ICU site is hosted at http://www.ibm.com/software/globalization/icu/. It contains a handy "Getting started with ICU" section. The other key site is found at http://icu.sourceforge.net/ and is by SourceForge, the development and download repository of open source code and applications. The sites are linked together in many ways, so you can start in either of them. ICU contains software components for several purposes:
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