Programming Jakarta Struts

Internationalizing Your Struts Applications

The internationalization support provided by the Struts framework focuses almost exclusively on the presentation of text and images for the application. Functionality such as accepting input from nontraditional languages is not covered within the Struts framework.

As you’ve already seen, depending on your Struts configuration settings, the framework can determine the preferred locale for a user and store it into the user’s session. Once the user’s locale has been determined, Struts can use this locale to look up text and other resources from the resource bundles. The resource bundles are essential components in the Struts framework.

The Struts Resource Bundle

As you saw in Chapter 4, each of your application modules can be configured with one or more resource bundles. The information within each bundle is available to actions, action forms, JSP pages, and custom tags alike.

Creating a Struts resource bundle

Resource bundles that you create must follow the conventions of the PropertyResourceBundle class from the Java core library. That is, you need to create a text file for your resource bundle that has a .properties extension and that adheres to the guidelines discussed in the JavaDoc for the java.util.Properties class. The most important of these guidelines is that the format of the messages within this file is:

key=value

Example 12-3 displays a properties file called StorefrontMessageResources.properties that can be loaded by the Struts ...