For quite a while, a bunch of great developers frustrated by the lack of internationalization solutions for Rails started writing their own plugins http://wiki.rubyonrails.org/rails/pages/InternationalizationComparison
The major problem for us was the fact that we always had to monkey patch Rails so people could use Rails helpers / ActiveRecord in another languages than English.
Most of us got frustrated and decided to work together in order to find a compromise and define an internationalization standard for Rails. Based on our different approaches and background we spent hours crafting a solution that will hopefully provide Rails with more flexibility.
Looking at Globalize, Simple Localization, Ruby-GetText-Package or GlobaLite, you will notice a totally different approach. It has been really hard for us to agree on all the details but we did it!
Here is a quick preview of what we are planning to do.
2 objectives:
* eliminate the need for monkey patching Rails in order to internationalize an application.
* a common api that can be leveraged by all l10n plugins.
In order to do that, we agreed to keep things as simple as possible so each of us can developer his/her own solution, however since we want to have a common base to work from we decided to:
- develop an internationalization library (i18n) that will handle all the usual i18n tasks such as adding a localization method, interpolation and basic pluralization. The i18n library will have built-in graceful degradation support using a default language provided by the library author. (used if no localization library is loaded)
- patch Rails libraries to use the i18n library. (with English as fallback language)
- develop a Localization library (l10n) that will handle locales, advanced pluralization rules, advanced interpolation and localization of objects (string, date/time, currency..). The l10n lib will use yaml files to lookup string localizations and use a ruby file defining language rules.
I don't want to get into the implementation details since we are working on an official document. But we believe that by approaching the challenge this way, we will offer a very flexible solution that can be used by other libraries (Merb, Sinatra, DataMapper...) and at the same time can be extended by any plugin/gem developers without having to reinvent the wheel.
Expect more details in the next few weeks.
-Matt
