PHP and Internationalisation – Mike McKenna

Yahoo has released two major new modules for PHP to greatly increase the ability to create robust international applications.

The first is PHP-intl (http://uk.php.net/intl) which provides functionality based on Unicode, the global text encoding standard. PHP-intl provides formatting, collation, date handling,  and complex character handling for languages such as Thai and Hindi.

The second new module is PHP-rb, available through http://uk.php.net <http://uk.php.net/>  and http://github.com <http://github.com/>  by Hack Day.  PHP-rb provides powerful resource bundle and message handling, with locale fall-back to enable multilingual and multi-locale applications to serve an appropriate experience no matter where your users live.  The resource bundle mechanism is very close to Java

properties files in syntax, but allows multiple line entries, and all data in Unicode UTF-8.

This one hour talk will give a brief overview of internationalisation issues, and how they can be designed for using PHP.  Topics covered will be User Experience Design faux pas, dealing with personalisation and design elements, dynamic message handling, and formatting for the unexpected.

Mike McKenna, Yahoo!

Mike McKenna leads internationalisation architecture and engineering at Yahoo! Inc. He is a specialist in the globalisation of applications and distributed systems with over one-and-a-half decades of internationalisation experience. He is a licensed professional engineer with extensive experience consulting and leading globalisation projects for a number of Fortune 500 companies. Mike has a background in global e-commerce, application design, database internals, distributed bibliographic systems, test engineering and ethnographic research.