A New Strategy of Language Pack Management for Wireless Apps
By Huang Chang & Tong Chun Jie2005-04-18
Introduction
Because of the popularity of mobile devices today, the devices are always moving from one place to another, from one country to another, and even from one region to another. Interaction with users from different countries and different cultural backgrounds casts an increasing demand on globalization features for device applications. Implementation of globalization features in applications for mobile devices is quite different compared with that for desktops or servers. The primary difference is the different hosting environments in terms of hardware and software capacity. Therefore, globalization support is a critical concern in designing applications for global e-business clients such as PDAs, which have adequate network capacity but low storage capacity.
The OSGi specifications define a standardized, component-oriented computing environment for networked services. Currently, a wide range of device vendors have implemented the OSGi specifications and empowered their device products with OSGi as the hosting platform for wireless applications. A remarkable feature of the advantages of OSGi is its component-based architecture, which enables device-side applications to load required components from the management sever in the run time. In this sense, application components can be customized to be on-demand in order to meet the shortage in device storage.
In this article, we investigate the feasibility that takes advantage of OSGi's componentization feature to enable globalization support in wireless applications. Specifically, under the componential programming framework of OSGi, we encapsulate each language pack (LP) supported by wireless applications into different OSGi components called bundles so that they can be requested and delivered separately in the run time. Also, by leveraging the service registry mechanism in Service Management Framework, the device application, as a single executable, can switch among global users of different locales with a minimum user intervention footprint and can always keep itself on.
First published by IBM DeveloperWorks
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