Hi, I'm new to ruby and rails. I need support for for localized pages, pages with multilingual content, international date/time formats, and calendar and time zone calculations. Initially, I asked someone on the ICU project <http://www.icu-project.org/> and they directed me to ICU4R <http://icu4r.rubyforge.org/>. I thought that this was my solution until I scrolled down and found this comment: "The code is slow and inefficient yet, is still highly experimental, so can have many security and memory leaks, bugs, inconsistent documentation, incomplete test suite. Use it at your own risk." Next, I found this link: http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/InternationalizationComparison Globalize <http://www.globalize-rails.org/globalize/> looks very up-to-date and well supported. And every time I ask people about internationalization options, they seem to either mention Globalize or say that they don't know. Is Globalize the most widely used option? Do people on this list recommend Globalize or other options? thanks, Chuck
on 02.11.2007 21:20
on 05.11.2007 10:21
Hi Chuck, Chuck R. wrote: > > Is Globalize the most widely used option? Do people on this list > recommend Globalize or other options? > Globalize is probably is one of the most widely used solutions for internationalisation in Rails, given, as you say, it is well looked after and provides a very easy solution to integrate with your Rails project. However, I suspect most people are slightly suspicious about the way translations are handled, everything in Globalize is stored in three tables, including one master table that contains all of your translations in every language. If your into wanting to make DB access as minimal and efficient as possible, like me, then this may or may not ring bells. Personally, I now use Gettext for all of my web application texts, as its very mature and while initially it takes a bit of understanding, it offers the most complete solutions for handling strings. Having said that, I did use Globalize in one major project and it works great! One thing you should bare in mind, is the distinction between translating the application (the text in the views) and the data models. Globalize will throw these together in the same basket, but I'm not convinced this is an ideal solution. Checkout my plugin 'translate_columns' for a description of the problems and a solution that I came up with: http://samlown.com/page/RailsTranslateColumnsPluginReadme This only handles models, so you'd need to find another solution, such as globalize or gettext, for your views. I18n is quite complex, and requires a bit of thought to implement well, but stick with it, its worth the effort! Cheers, Sam