| [dtp-dev] ICU4J Adoption in DTP |
As part of our Callisto responsibilities, we need to adopt ICU4J (http://icu.sourceforge.net/) in DTP. This provides robust internationalization/localization support in ways not covered by the standard J2SE.Stating in Eclipse 3.2M4, an ICU4J plug-in is included in the platform download, and this is the version that we should use in DTP. The impact of making this change is using ICU4J equivalent classes in place of stock J2SE one. These are: java.text.BreakIterator java.text.CollationKey java.text.Collator java.text.DateFormat java.text.DecimalFormat java.text.NumberFormat java.text.SimpleDateFormat java.text.StringCharacterIterator java.util.StringTokenizer Essentially, this means replacing the java.* package names for these class (typically in import statements) to com.ibm.icu.* equivalents. Scanning the code currently included in the DTP build, I found 31 occurrences in 13 plug-ins (See attached report). I'd like to suggest that one person (me) makes all these changes, since each is easy and low-risk. In discussions with the PMC yesterday, we set early February (2/10) as a target for completing this. If the group agrees, I will make these changes for M3 (1/20) in all except for the ODA plug-ins, which will follow in early February after the next BIRT release. Next, there is the question of Eclipse 3.1 support. Fortunately, the ICU4J plug-in is a stand-alone jar wrapper, so extracting it from Eclipse 3.2M4 and using it Eclipse 3.1 is, in theory, not a problem. When I tried this, however, the ICU4J plug-in failed to install, due to OSGI compliance levels and lazy-loading values set in the manifest file. We've dealt with the lazy-loading values in the back-port of the org.eclipse.ui.navigator plug-in already, so that was easy to fix. After some research, I found that removing the compliance level flag allows the plug-in to install and load in Eclipse 3.1. I tested the ICU4J functionality with a simple plug-in, and it seemed to work correctly. Of course, I did not run a comprehensive test, but nothing seems to be blocking this usage in Eclipse 3.1. In order to make this available to the community for use and further testing, we have included this tweaked version of ICU4J in today's "Eclipse 3.1 compatibility pack" iteration build, found on the DTP download page. Regards, John Graham Eclipse Data Tools Platform PMC Staff Software Engineer Sybase, Inc. (See attached file: icu4j_report.pdf)
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