Internationalization Using jquery.i18n.properties.js
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Join For FreeInternationalization refers to automatically showing localized text in your pages for users visiting your site from different regions in the world or localizing the site content based on the language preference chosen by the user.
These days most of the web applications are designed to provide rich user experience. With this, the use of JavaScript based UI components has increased many folds. We often need to support internationalization on these JavaScript based Rich Internet Applications (RIA). While looking for JavaScript based internationalization solution I came across a very good jQuery plugin jquery.i18n.properties.js. This plugin uses .properties files to localize the content into different languages. In this tutorial I will show you how we can use this plugin.
Getting jquery.i18n.properties.js
First of all we need to download the plugin. This is quite lightweight plugin. The file size is
around 17.4 KB, but this can be minified and size will reduce to around 4.3 KB.
The plugin can be downloaded from https://github.com/jquery-i18n-properties/jquery-i18n-properties.
A minified version of the same is available at http://code.google.com/p/jquery-i18n-properties/downloads/list
Internationalization Demo
The first step as with all JavaScript libraries is to include the JavaScript into HTML. Jquery.i18n.properties.js is a jQuery plugin; hence we need to include jQuery also into HTML before jquery.i18n.properties.js like shown below:
<HEAD>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery-1.10.2.js"></script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="js/jquery.i18n.properties.js"></script>
</HEAD>Sample HTML Code
Before discussing on how to use jquery.i18n.properties.js, let us first create a sample HTML that we will use later. The sample HTML below has a dropdown which allows the user to choose a language. The sample HTML displays two messages which would be localized based on the language chosen from the dropdown.
<BODY>
<h2 style="text-align: center; color:#777;">Internationalization using jQuery.i18n.properties</h2>
<div style="margin-left: 20px; margin-bottom: 20px;" id="langBox">
Language:
<select id="lang">
<option value="browser" selected>Browser Default</option>
<option value="en">en</option>
<option value="de_DE">de_DE</option>
<option value="es_ES">es_ES</option>
<option value="fr">fr</option>
</select>
</div>
<div style="margin-left: 20px;" id="msg_welcome">Welcome to the Demo Site!</div><br>
<div style="margin-left: 20px;" id="msg_selLang">Your Selected Language is: Default </div>
</BODY>Define .properties files
The jquery.i18n.properties.js plugin consumes .properties files for doing text translations. We will use the following .properties files in this demo.
Messages.properties
msg_welcome = Welcome to the Demo Site!
msg_selLang = Your Selected Language is: {0}
Messages_es_ES.properties
msg_welcome = Bienvenido al sitio de demostración!
msg_selLang = El idioma seleccionado es: {0}Loading localized strings from .properties
Now we have everything ready to use the plugin, let us see how we can use this plugin to load the translated strings from properties files. The below code sample is used to load the resource bundle properties file using jquery.i18n.properties.js
$.i18n.properties({
name: 'Messages',
path: 'bundle/',
mode: 'both',
language: lang,
callback: function() {
$("#msg_welcome").text($.i18n.prop('msg_welcome')); $("#msg_selLang").text($.i18n.prop('msg_selLang', lang));
}
});The below table provides details about the various options available for $.i18n.properties() (source: http://codingwithcoffee.com/?p=272)
Option Description Notes name Name (or names) of files representing resource bundles
(eg, ‘Messages’ or ['Msg1','Msg2']) Required
String or String[] language
ISO-639 Language code and, optionally, ISO-3166
country code (eg, ‘en’, ‘en_US’, ‘pt_PT’). If not specified, language reported by the browser will be used instead. Optional
String path Path to directory that contains ‘.properties‘files
to load. Optional
String
mode
Option to have resource bundle keys available as JavaScript
variables/functions OR as a map. Possible options: ‘vars’ (default), ‘map’ or ‘both’. Optional
String callback
Callback function to be called upon script execution
completion Optional
function()
Here mode is set to ‘both’ hence the messages can be fetched using map approach as well as JavaScript variables/functions. In the above code sample we used map to retrieve the translated text. The same can be achieved using JavaScript variables/functions as shown below:
$("#msg_welcome").text(msg_welcome);
$("#msg_selLang").text(msg_selLang(lang));String parameterization
Jquery.i18n.properties.js also supports parameterization of messages. This we have already used in the sample above for the second message.
$("#msg_selLang").text($.i18n.prop('msg_selLang', lang));In the properties file the message is defined as
msg_selLang = Your Selected Language is: {0}Here {0} is replaced by the argument ‘lang’ value. As in java resource bundles, we can use multiple {} to define custom messages with multiple parameters.
The final output
The following screen shots show the output of this demo. The below screen shot is of the default page
When the language in drop down is changed to es_ES the text from Message_es_ES.properties is read and displayed as shown below:
Advantages of jquery.i18n.properties.js
- The main advantage of this plugin is that it uses .properties files for internationalization. This is helpful as same properties files could be shared with other parts of the program.
- The support of parameterization of strings is also beneficial as this enables one to have complex multilingual strings.
- Has option to use map as well as JavaScript variables/functions for retrieving translated strings.
- The plugin is very lightweight and can be easily used with any HTML as it is jQuery based.
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