A simple example app for Hello World from the easiest way to localization (l10n).
##Instructions
In order to see this web app working, do the following:
$ npm install
$ node app-normal
$ node app-express
$ node app-static
$ node app-render
$ node app-localized
Now you can see server-side localization in node.js by going to:
- http://localhost:3000/
- http://localhost:3001/
- http://localhost:3002/
- http://localhost:3003/
- http://localhost:3004/
For the last app (app-localized) when you run it you can try change the URL to see the localization in action by doing
If you have added more languages to the locale folder you can simply change the URL base on the file name see locale section for more info
##Locale
At this moment we are using i18n-abide to do the localization (l10n) and this plugin will load the string from directory called
locale and in this language bundle we will have to named the language based on the Using Language Identifiers (RFC 3066) standard
For example English en_US or Thai we will use th_TH for that
###Format of the locale file
Currently the i18n-abide that is modified by :humphd made it works with Property Lists (plist) which is easy to maintain and it is also supported by Transifex file formats, among them .po, .ini, .xml, etc.
Node.js and Transifex both support .plist files, which are what was created for OS X and iPhone apps. These are simple XML files, and for the purposes of localizaiton, contain key/value pairs in a dictionary. Below is an example:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE plist PUBLIC "-//Apple Computer//DTD PLIST 1.0//EN" "http://www.apple.com/DTDs/PropertyList-1.0.dtd">
<plist version="1.0">
<dict>
<key>helloworld</key>
<string>Hello World</string>
</dict>
</plist>##Usage for localization (quoted from :humphd from amore.webmaker.org's repo
Strings in the locale files are used via templates. The i18n module adds 3 things to the global scope which templated JS can use, specifically:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="{{ lang }}" dir="{{ lang_dir }}">
...
<p id="main">{{ gettext( "helloworld" ) }}</p>Here the lang will be the locale's language, for example en or en_US. The lang_dir variable will be
the direction of the language (rtl or ltr). Finally, the gettext function allows a string to be retrieved
from the locale using an ID. The ID used should match one in the <key>...</key> portion of the .plist file.