Arabic content

[Laurent Féral-Pierssens <la...@distincthorizon.com>]

Hi,

We have been realizing web applications for the last 2 years using
Tomcat. Last week, one of our clients asked us if we could provide a
multilingual application that would contain English, French and Arabic
content.

My questions are vague for now. Did anyone actually produced an
application with Arabic content? What should we have to take in
consideration in our design and development? What are the risks and
traps to avoid while coding such webapp? Is there a problem with
displaying such information under Tomcat? storing it in MySQL? 

Those questions may actually be out of context for Tomcat. But your
opinion would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Laurent



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RE: Arabic content

[Laurent Féral-Pierssens <la...@distincthorizon.com>]

Thank you for all your comments. I will report them and try to better
evaluate the work at hand.

Regards,
Laurent



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Re: Arabic content

["anthony.dodd" <an...@ntlworld.com>]

We've done some work in this area.

We generate xhtml output using xslt's in conjuntion with an xml datasource.
We store the arabic in the database. Originally we held an NCR encoded form
of the arabic text, we now hold the arab text in a unicode format in a
database.

We've written some JSP tags to handle localisation issues "right to left",
"left to right" and the retrieval of text from the database. We also wrote
equivalent xslt extensions, so the same could be done from inside a
stylesheet (using such extensions may prevent you generating translets from
your stylesheets). Each stylesheet is passed a string representation of the
required locale (e.g. en_GB, ar_KW)
and this value is passed to each of the extension functions.

When using the NCR encoded form of the arabic, it displayed fine in the main
window of the browser, but you couldn't use it on alt tags or in setting the
title bar.

The only issue remining for us is peformance we need to have some of the
texts cached (e.g. generate a resource bundle on system startup, there's a
jakarta project fo handling java classes, I think the people at Jboss use to
use it) and some retrieved on demand from a database.

We're an xml datasource carries localised text, be sure to use UTF-8
encoding.

Drop us a line if you need any more advice.
Tony

----- Original Message -----
From: "Laurent Féral-Pierssens" <la...@distincthorizon.com>
To: <to...@jakarta.apache.org>
Sent: Monday, August 19, 2002 12:25 PM
Subject: Arabic content


>
>
> Hi,
>
> We have been realizing web applications for the last 2 years using
> Tomcat. Last week, one of our clients asked us if we could provide a
> multilingual application that would contain English, French and Arabic
> content.
>
> My questions are vague for now. Did anyone actually produced an
> application with Arabic content? What should we have to take in
> consideration in our design and development? What are the risks and
> traps to avoid while coding such webapp? Is there a problem with
> displaying such information under Tomcat? storing it in MySQL?
>
> Those questions may actually be out of context for Tomcat. But your
> opinion would be much appreciated.
>
> Regards,
>
> Laurent
>
>
>
> --
> To unsubscribe, e-mail:
<ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
> For additional commands, e-mail:
<ma...@jakarta.apache.org>
>


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Re: Arabic content

["Andre E. Bar'yudin" <ba...@pob.huji.ac.il>]

Laurent Féral-Pierssens wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> We have been realizing web applications for the last 2 years using
> Tomcat. Last week, one of our clients asked us if we could provide a
> multilingual application that would contain English, French and Arabic
> content.
> 
> My questions are vague for now. Did anyone actually produced an
> application with Arabic content? What should we have to take in
> consideration in our design and development? What are the risks and
> traps to avoid while coding such webapp? Is there a problem with
> displaying such information under Tomcat? storing it in MySQL? 

I implemented a few applications which had multilingual support 
(English/Hebrew/Russian/Spanish right now).  All the data is stored as 
Unicode and is sent to client in UTF-8 encoding - believe me, it saved 
me a lot of trouble, especially due to the Java built-in support of 
UNICODE.  I don't know whether MySQL supports any UNICODE encodings.  I 
had success with PostgreSQL/MS SQL/Oracle.

Some Tomcat versions have problems with UTF-8 for some reason.  I've 
found that versions 4.0.2, 4.0.3 and 4.1.9beta work.  All others have 
failed for me (and I tested them one by one with the same code).

As to displaying - as long as your client's software supports UTF-8 it 
works.  This includes IE and recent versions of Mozilla/Netscape.  Opera 
is still bad when it comes to RTL languages.

> Those questions may actually be out of context for Tomcat. But your
> opinion would be much appreciated.
> 
> Regards,
> 
> Laurent



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RE: Arabic content

["Sexton, George" <gs...@mhsoftware.com>]

I have done Hebrew before, and it's pretty much the same problem.

The major issue is that you have content that is Right to left, and content
that is left to right. Since it is a single-byte language, you don't have to
use Unicode, you just have to set the code-page to the right value.

RTL support is getting better. Last I checked (a few months ago), IE was the
only one that supported it fully. Mozilla does support it, but when you have
LTR text embedded inside the page (Company names, English Names, Numerals,
etc), the rendering engine doesn't handle it. So, you are pretty much going
to be limited to IE as a client. If you are using graphics, particularly
things like pointy arrows, they will be pointing the wrong way when you set
the DIR=RTL attribute for the body.

Plan on this being difficult and taking a long time...

-----Original Message-----
From: Laurent Féral-Pierssens [mailto:laurent-lists@distincthorizon.com]
Sent: 19 August, 2002 1:26 PM
To: tomcat-user@jakarta.apache.org
Subject: Arabic content




Hi,

We have been realizing web applications for the last 2 years using
Tomcat. Last week, one of our clients asked us if we could provide a
multilingual application that would contain English, French and Arabic
content.

My questions are vague for now. Did anyone actually produced an
application with Arabic content? What should we have to take in
consideration in our design and development? What are the risks and
traps to avoid while coding such webapp? Is there a problem with
displaying such information under Tomcat? storing it in MySQL?

Those questions may actually be out of context for Tomcat. But your
opinion would be much appreciated.

Regards,

Laurent



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