Open-SourceApproachestoUnicodeEnablement.pptVIP

Open-Source Approaches to Unicode Enablement Panel Discussion Agenda Panel Introductions Library Descriptions and Demos What is Open Source? What is the Open Source experience? Q and A Today’s Panel Frank Tang Helena Shih Ulrich Drepper Tex Texin Netscape ICU glibc Moderator Library Descriptions and Demos GNU libc /glibc Mozilla: International Library of Mozilla /projects/intl IBM: International Components for Unicode /icu International Library for Mozilla Frank Tang Netscape Communications Mozilla GNU Libc Ulrich Drepper GNU, RedHat GNU libc Library supporting multibyte and wide characters localedef tool allows definition of locales for any charsets, including UTF8, UCS2 using charset requires just a description and a conversion module Wide character is UCS-4, native byte order GNU libc conversion functions iconv implementation is unique Conversions are transitive A to C A to B to C In most cases, UCS-4 is used as common denominator Licensing Development Process RedHat is completely open source. Code is licensed as LGPL, assigned to Free Software Foundation FSF This is the same method as GNU Small teams of developers with a “dictatorial decision maker”. Comments accepted, taken into account Extensive peer reviewing International Components for Unicode ICU Helena Shih IBM Unicode Technology Center Unicode support in the Industry Lack of a complete set of features in most implementations. Inconsistent across different environments. Win32 vs. POSIX, for example. Poor portability. Unable to share the resources with other products. Almost no extensibility and customization. Not a concern for most companies when a product is first designed. ICU Objectives Single release for world-wide distribution Quality Unicode I18N support across platforms Simplified development localization process Consistent results in both C/C++ and Java Powerful, portable API available to the Open-Source development community Important resources sharing mechanism ICU Features Parallel