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Design Goals

The fundamental objective for the JDK 1.1 Internationalization APIs is to allow developers to easily write global applications and applets. The following are the design goals used to achieve this objective.

International by Default

Traditionally, internationalization has been a separate process that is optionally performed after normal development. This model does not work for developers writing Internet programs in "Internet Time". By contrast, Java programs should be internationalized by default. This implies that it should be easier than not to write internationalized Java code.

Object-Oriented Design

Traditional internationalization support has been procedural in design and has relied on global state to affect locale-dependent operations. Java internationalization requires an extensible, object-oriented design that avoids global state.

Multilingual Support

Not only is every major language on the planet used on the Internet, but users often need to use combinations of these languages in order to communicate with each other. Java must provide multilingual support as well as support for many individual languages.

Platform Independence

Java programs must function on many different platforms. Internationalization must always work the same, independent of the platform. Therefore, the Java Internationalization APIs must be platform independent.

Support for Unicode

Unicode enables multilingual programs. Java is unique in programming languages in having chosen Unicode as its primitive built-in character type. JDK 1.1 supports the Unicode Standard, Version 2.0.

Backwards Compatibility

An API implementation needs to remain backwards compatible. This includes classes, interfaces, and methods that cannot be internationalized because of inherent design limitations. These limitations are noted and alternative classes, interfaces, and methods provided.

Focus on JDK 1.1's Clients

Enabling users of JDK 1.1 to create global programs is the focus of this release. Internationalization and localization of the JDK itself is not a goal for this release; this will be done in a later release.

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