Dr. Muhlin Chen This is Me

 Web References

1. 1. Inter-language with e-bin

   www.computingjapan.com/magazin - [Cached]

   Published on: 7/13/2001   Last Visited: 7/13/2001

   The technical reasons for this were explained by the key developer of e-bin , Dr. Muhlin Chen , Associate Director of the Research Computing Group of the University of Nebraska at Lincoln , who had also worked on the Interproof project. From the start , Chen and his assistant Yong-Jia Ni , also of the Research Computing Group , planned the project to be bilingual. By using an underlying technology which allowed for double byte characters , parallel design of the English and Japanese sites was made possible. Chen explains , We used a Java-like scripting language known as Pagelet , designed by us , to handle the server side. It's similar to Sun's current dynamic page language ( JSP ) , but Pagelet was the only one of its kind at the time. We were not sure at first whether we would have problems with double byte characters , however we only needed to change three or four lines of code in the interpreter for it to be able to handle double-byte characters.. The Web server ( Apache ) and the database engine ( mysql ) are double byte capable , so all the ingredients for true localization were there. Chen again : Java is a modern language - the built-in Unicode and multilingual support really reduced a lot of work for us. Pagelet is designed so that you can simply copy the files to another location , and they still work. For instance , after we designed the site in English , it only took us a few seconds to duplicate the directory structure for Japanese.. The result of this for users is that a login can be done in either English or Japanese , and users can click a button at any time to change the language of the interface for the current screen , even when that screen is the result of a database query.
   
   Effective localization includes time.