Professional Adobe® Flex® 3

Chapter 37. Resource Bundles and Data Localization

This chapter describes how Flex 3 supports properties files and resource bundles. The core focus will be on the benefits that these two features provide for internationalizing and localizing your Flex applications. The topics that will be covered include:

• Globalizing Flex applications (internationalization and localization)

• Loading resources at runtime

• Globalizing AIR applications

Overview

In this increasingly connected global Internet community, it is becoming very important to think about supporting multiple languages in your Flex and AIR applications. Even if you're not thinking about supporting multiple languages during the initial release of your application, it's worth considering building in the support up front so that you will not have to retrofit multilanguage support in during subsequent releases. As an added incentive, it's worth noting that building in multilingual support in your application can help with separating your copy from your code.

The process of separating your application code from the copy and supporting assets for each language is known as internationalization, or i18n for short. By building i18n support into your application, you are enabling it to add support in for new languages without having to change your application code. A proper i18n-enabled application will not have any locale-specific information hard-coded into it.

The process of adding in support for specific locales is called localization, or ...