Web and WebWorks Development

[astanley]

Folks,

I wanted to ask whether anyone has written a WebWorks application that displays content localized to the language of the current user?

If so, what approach did you take to solve this problem (custom extension, user-selection options screen, AJAX magic, etc)?

Reason for asking is I want to get feedback from the community about how much interest there is in this topic and whether there is a most popular / desirable solution.  What are your opinions?

If anyone has written a JavaScript Extension for this already it would make an ideal contribution candidate for of the BlackBerry WebWorks Open Source project.  If so, please contact me.

Cheers,

Adam

[lagunex]

Hi Adam.

I'm currently developing one with i8n. My solution so far have been simple. The language is set as a user preference within the app.

However I want the default language to be set according to the user's phone display. I'll be writing a JavaScript extension for that. I'll need extensions in the future so it is a good starting point.

The resources are saved in a JavaScript hash, so you can do things like i8n[lang].BUTTON_LABEL where lang is the variable that holds the preference set before. I used JSON to define the hash easily.

I'd like to get rid of the [lang] part so it is hidden but haven't found a clean way yet.

What do you think? Any suggestions?

Cheers.

[interfaSys]

I failed to find anything good enough for Sencha Touch 1, but we plan on using this for ST2 apps:

https://github.com/mitchellsimoens/Ux.locale.Manager

The strings are neatly organized in JSON files.

The plan is to detect the user's locale via a Webworks API and to offer a language selector in the preference panel as well. 

[astanley]

Hi lagunex,

Thanks for your feedback!  Appreciate you sharing your solution.

As a tip, there is now a "Locale" extension published for developers to use in our Github Community APIs repo.  You should be able to use this to get the default language set by your users.

Smartphone extension:

https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-Community-APIs/tree/master/Smartphone/Locale

Tablet OS extension:

https://github.com/blackberry/WebWorks-Community-APIs/tree/master/Tablet/Locale

Best,

Adam