Java Enterprise Best Practices

Design Internationalization-Ready Business Objects

The components needed to construct your business object layer are too vast to enumerate or give due treatment in this chapter. When designing for internationalization, however, you must always take into consideration the types of data items that you are working with. In this chapter, we cannot go into all the details of how to use the various internationalization APIs for formatting items such as numbers, dates, and times, but we can say that if you haven’t done so already, familiarize yourself with the following Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) APIs^[30] when designing various J2EE components (e.g., servlets, standard JavaBeans, Enterprise JavaBeans (EJBs), and web services). Here are some important classes:

java.text.BreakIterator

Allows you to break apart text in a locale-specific way.

java.text.Collator

Useful if you need to sort a list of data (e.g., strings). The sorting rules will differ per locale.

java.text.DateFormat

Appropriate for formatting and parsing date strings in a locale-independent manner.

java.text.MessageFormat

Used when you need to construct appropriate messages in a language-independent manner.

java.text.NumberFormat

Appropriate for formatting and parsing numeric values in a locale-independent manner.

java.util.Locale

As the Java documentation says, “represents a specific geographical, political, or cultural region.”

java.util.ResourceBundle

Contains locale-specific objects.

This is by far not ...