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Ruby on Rails I18n, RailsConf Europe and Globalize2

RailsConf Europe talk: "The future of I18n in Ruby on Rails"

RailsConf Europe 2008

I'll be giving a talk about "The future of I18n in Ruby on Rails" on RailsConf Europe next week together with Marko Seppae.

Am I excited about it? You bet! Will that be an interesting talk for everyone involved into Rails I18n? Of course, I'm sure :)

Also, there are some plans to also work on I18n/Rails during the Code Community Drive but I'm not sure what the status of this is right now.

I'm personally planning to take care of another project in the same context already: adva-cms. So I might not be able to put a great amount of effort into preparing a I18n/Rails workshop here. I'd be absolutely happy to help with it though, of course, if somebody wanted to jump at it.

So, if you're going to go to RailsConf Eu next week and are interested in these things be sure to drop me a note and/or catch me at Bratwurst on Rails (that's the awesome socializing event the evening before the actual RailsConf.)

Changes to the I18n gem library

Since the I18n API and the integration to Rails got merged back to Rails edge we've receive quite a lot of feedback from people trying the I18n API and Simple backend. This resulted in that a few things have been changed. E.g.:

  • The Simple backend is now a class. This makes it more easy to reuse its features and only overwrite a certain method (like, e.g., for more flexible pluralization).
  • Pluralization data is now expected to be provided as a Hash using keys such as :one, :few, :many, :zero, :other like defined by CLDR.
  • A method #load_translations has been added that takes a source for translation data (such as yml and rb files) and loads translations from there.
  • The scopes for translations provided by Rails have been cleaned up to be more consistent.
  • The code should work with Ruby 1.9 now.

Globalize2 under heavy development

A couple of weeks ago Joshua Harvey, Marko Seppae and I have started implementing Globalize2 which turns out to be an extremely interesting project because with the new I18n foundation it now looks completely different, very slick and nice.

As far as we can tell right now Globalize2 will be much more of a toolbox of small tools where you can pick what you need. ActiveRecord translations will be solved unobtrusively. We'll support a good part of RFC4646/47 compliance for Locales and use localization data for formats etc. from CLDR which is quite a big thing, in my opinion.

We now have a website at rails-i18n.org

You probably already found it because I've been throwing the link around everywhere lately but it might still be worth mentioning that we now have a website at http://rails-i18n.org which is, obviously, dedicated to I18n on and for Ruby on Rails. Right now we're basically collecting resources on the Wiki and I hope to post some news to the blog every once in a while.

If you're interested to publish any I18n-related blog posts over there - just let me know.

Btw http://rails-i18n.org is, of course, also driven by adva-cms which is the CMS project I've been working on for the last couple of months. Check it out!