JalView i18n - Here it goes!!!

Jalview Developers
1

Hi David - try pushing now - I'd forgotten to give you commit rights !

With regard to your points:

Here you have a patch with the second i18n review. There are still some tasks pending. I'll try to summarize:

a) Formatting numbers: java.text.NumberFormat should be used when displaying numbers and also when converting user input to numbers for the app to work with. We have to get the locale from jalview.util.MessageManager.

Hm. OK. this might require some work.

b) Formatting dates: java.text.DateFormat with the same comments.

Not so difficult - very few dates appear in Jalview - release date and news dates are pretty much the only ones. Unfortunately, most of the other places where they do appear are in opaque text blocks, or as data collected from servers.. but not actually marked up as dates.

c) Avoid message constructed by code. There a lot of examples of user messages that are built in the code as a concatenation of strings. I haven't change this yet because it may implied to change code structure and I wanted to get your feedback first.

this will be the most difficult area. Jalview (like pretty much all bioinformatics programs) generates human readable reports from complex data structures. I'm wondering about how sensible it will be to tie some of these to the Locale - since even if I were wanting Jalview's buttons and menus to be in Spanish, I'd want text that would be destined for insertion into a manuscript to be written in English.

I cannot push my commit to the repo. Eclipse says that the repo is not configured to push by HTTP. I suppose that probably I have not enough priveliges to perform a write operation. :frowning:

done (hopefully!).

In what release have you plan to include i18n? I've seen at credits page that there is a dev in Spain (Paolo di Tomasso). Although he seems to be Italian, probably can help in a Spanish translation. I'm a newbie in biosw so I'm afraid I can't help on this. It's better to translate knowing that the programs really does. :-\

Let's see what Paolo says :slight_smile:

Jim.

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On 29/08/2013 12:49, David Roldán Martínez wrote:

2

Hi all,

Please, let me introduce myself. My name is David Roldán Martínez and I’m a newbie in biosw but hardworking and willing to be helpful. It will be a pleasure to help you as far as a I can and I would appreciate if anybody points me to good resources to know about bioSW. Thanks so much in advance.

As for i18n, my proposal is to do the following:
a) Number formats. I still don’t know quite well how the program works in deep. There are 36 potential points needed to be reviewed, as every number conversion has to be done using java.text.NumberFormat with the locale stored a jalview.utils.MessageManager.getLocale().

b) Date formats. This seems not to be a problems. Please, choose a date format for dates & times in JalView and I’ll modify DateFormat handling with the proper format.
c) Messages built in the code. I’ll leave them as they are, though in my opinion it would be useful if anybody makes a list with the one that should remain in English and the ones that can be translated. Keeping an app as i18ned as possible always help in international environments.

Cheers,

David

···

2013/8/29 Jim Procter <jprocter@compbio.dundee.ac.uk>

Hi David - try pushing now - I’d forgotten to give you commit rights !

With regard to your points:

On 29/08/2013 12:49, David Roldán Martínez wrote:

Here you have a patch with the second i18n review. There are still some tasks pending. I’ll try to summarize:

a) Formatting numbers: java.text.NumberFormat should be used when displaying numbers and also when converting user input to numbers for the app to work with. We have to get the locale from jalview.util.MessageManager.

Hm. OK. this might require some work.

b) Formatting dates: java.text.DateFormat with the same comments.

Not so difficult - very few dates appear in Jalview - release date and news dates are pretty much the only ones. Unfortunately, most of the other places where they do appear are in opaque text blocks, or as data collected from servers… but not actually marked up as dates.

c) Avoid message constructed by code. There a lot of examples of user messages that are built in the code as a concatenation of strings. I haven’t change this yet because it may implied to change code structure and I wanted to get your feedback first.

this will be the most difficult area. Jalview (like pretty much all bioinformatics programs) generates human readable reports from complex data structures. I’m wondering about how sensible it will be to tie some of these to the Locale - since even if I were wanting Jalview’s buttons and menus to be in Spanish, I’d want text that would be destined for insertion into a manuscript to be written in English.

I cannot push my commit to the repo. Eclipse says that the repo is not configured to push by HTTP. I suppose that probably I have not enough priveliges to perform a write operation. :frowning:

done (hopefully!).

In what release have you plan to include i18n? I’ve seen at credits page that there is a dev in Spain (Paolo di Tomasso). Although he seems to be Italian, probably can help in a Spanish translation. I’m a newbie in biosw so I’m afraid I can’t help on this. It’s better to translate knowing that the programs really does. :-\

Let’s see what Paolo says :slight_smile:

Jim.

3

Hi David. Thanks for introducing yourself to the list :slight_smile:

Push is done.

Excellent!

There's not much to be done about this now, but one thing I released I should have explained is how we structure commits in Jalview.

If you put the relevant Jalview issue in the commit message - in your case JAL-1354 (see http://issues.jalview.org/browse/JAL-1354), then issues.jalview.org will automagically associate the commit with the bug, which makes it very easy to track progress.

If you give access to a wiki or explain me how to proceed, I'll document how to develop i18n applications in Java so that we (Jalview devs) can take a look a this when developing.

We currently don't have a wiki - for many very painful reasons (mostly my lack of time :q) - so for the moment, it would be great if you could put a document inside the /docs directory of the Jalview source distribution. When we do have a wiki set up (which should be 'real soon now'(TM)), I'll move it in there.

May I write at my LinkedIn that I'm Jalview dev? Not sure about the requirements to become one of you. :-\

Heh - good question. Being a member of the jalview-dev list is definitely indicative of being a Jalview developer - so I guess adding an entry on linkedIn is fine! Furthermore, you'll be added to the growing list of authors on the About->Credits page on the website when we do the next release.

Jim.

···

On 29/08/2013 15:52, David Roldán Martínez wrote: