18.3. Strategies for localizing an application

Ideally an application is built from the “top down” with localization^[1] in mind from day one. If you always take this approach from the start, congratulations, this topic will be a breeze for you. But if you’ve ever written an application that has some hard-coded strings or perhaps some code that makes specific assumptions about status codes or date formatting, you have some work to do to make your applications play nicely across multiple locales.

^[1] Localization is the how to, and the why. Frank Ableson’s post on Linux Magazine scratches the surface: http://www.linux-mag.com/id/7794.

There are a number of perspectives on localization. We won’t cover all of them, but the discussion that follows should give you a good foundation for localizing your application. Throughout this chapter, most of the code examples we use are from a localized variant of the Field Service application you met in chapter 12. The code in chapter 12 is not localized. The chapter 20 code is both localized and is additionally translated into Spanish. Let’s get started!