The SunTM Global Application Developer Corner is a collection of information and resources to help developers globalize their applications. Resource material, sample code, testing tools and useful links provide information for developers to learn more about software globalization. New and useful resources are added on a quarterly basis.

One of the new items this quarter is a section on support for Unicode in the SolarisTM Operating Environment (Solaris OE).

General Topics:

UTF-8: What is it and why is it important?

Unicode is a character set supported across many commonly used software applications and operating systems. For example, many popular Web browser, e-mail and word processing applications support Unicode. Operating systems that support Unicode include Solaris OE, Linux, Microsoft Windows 2000 and Apple's Mac OS X. Applications that support Unicode are often capable of displaying multiple languages and scripts within the same document. In a multilingual office or business setting, Unicode's importance as a universal character set cannot be overlooked.

Unicode is the only practical character set option for applications that support multilingual documents. However, applications do have several options for how they encode Unicode. An encoding is the mapping of Unicode code points to a stream of storable code units or octets. The most common encodings include the following:

• UTF-8
• UTF-16
• UTF-32

Each encoding has advantages and drawbacks. However, one encoding in particular has gained widespread acceptance. That encoding is UTF-8. The GADC article describes UTF-8, what it is, and why it is important.

Other resources:

• Sun presentations at the 21st International Unicode Conference (Dublin, Ireland May 2002)

• Sun presentations at past Unicode Conferences. Provides an insight into the history of Sun's migration to Unicode.

For Solaris 9 OE:

• New Asian Unicode locales

• New non-Asian Unicode locales

• New Unicode related code conversion modules

• Full list Unicode related code conversion modules

• Overview of UTF-8 locale support

For Solaris 8 OE:

• Full list of Asian Unicode locales (Unicode locales have codeset UTF-8)

• Full list of non-Asian Unicode locales (Unicode locales have codeset UTF-8)

• Unicode related code conversion modules locales

• Overview of en_US.UTF-8 Locale Support

• Unicode Support in the Solaris 8 OE (white paper)

For Solaris 7 OE:

• Unicode Support in the Solaris OE

http://www.sun.com/developers/gadc/unicode/solaris [...read more...]

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