Java Enterprise Best Practices

Customize Localization and Data Manipulation Using XML and XSTL

To say that XML is widely becoming a popular data transport in web applications is an understatement. However, some aspects of XML related to internationalization are not necessarily overstated, but can be overlooked. See Example 8-9.

Example 8-9. Header portion of web.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="ISO-8859-1"?>
   
<!DOCTYPE web-app
    PUBLIC "-//Sun Microsystems, Inc.//DTD Web Application 2.2//EN"
    "http://java.sun.com/j2ee/dtds/web-app_2.2.dtd">
   
<web-app>
</web-app>

At this point, you probably have zeroed in on the encoding attribute of the XML prolog. In this snippet from a web.xml document, you can see that you are allowed to define the character encoding for the XML document. Example 8-9 specifies the encoding of the document as ISO-8859-1, or Latin-1. Typically, you will see XML documents with an encoding of UTF-8.

This attribute dictates the encoding of all the data in the XML document. Therefore, it affects how your XML parser treats the data. So, if you are writing your own XML documents, you should output the encoding in the XML prolog that is appropriate for the data within the XML document.

For example, suppose that you are passed data from the business object layer in XML that represents a user’s order from an online warehouse. Aside from the encoding, how can you display certain data elements appropriate for the user? Well, remember that the overall document and subsequent elements can be tagged with a locale ...