Re: PHP ICU project announcement

Great news... i was waiting for some movement on this front. i suppost there will be web project space for this ? also, i'd like to see specs if available. i may have some spare cycles to put some work in. in addition i have some code sitting around implementing various bits of i18n functionality that i'd like to submit pending discussion and approval.... l0t3k "Stanislav Malyshev" <stas@zend.com> wrote in message news:4697D3EA.2090201@zend.com... > Hi all! > > We have started a project to make it easier to support international > markets using PHP. A number of internationalization functions from IBM ICU > will be made available in PHP as an extension. > > This project targets both PHP 5 and PHP 6. The goal is to support the most > useful i18n services on both, while ensuring that any code running in PHP > 5 using these functions would work the same in PHP 6. The PHP 6 > implementation may provide additional functionality. > > The demand for internationalization services is large and is needed today, > so we decided to support them in PHP 5 and provide one common solution > that will also work going forward. There will be no PHP 4 support in the > project. > > The base for the extension is the ICU library > (http://www.icu-project.org/) already used by PHP 6, and the intent is > to follow the ICU model, so that people having experience working > with ICU in either C/C++ or Java could easily use the PHP API. > > The extension is composed of mostly independent functionality modules, > each of which would implement one of the functionalities below. > The APIs support both procedural and object-oriented notation > (internally referring to the same APIs). In PHP 5, the extension assumes > all incoming and outgoing strings are in UTF-8 encoding. > > The scope of the extension was defined as follows: > - Collation (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/ucol_8h.html) > - Number formatting (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/unum_8h.html) > - Date/time formatting > (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/udat_8h.html) > - Locales (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/uloc_8h.html) > - Calendars (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/ucal_8h.html) > - International domain names > (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/uidna_8h.html) > - Message formatting > (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/umsg_8h.html) > - Resource bundles (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/ures_8h.html) > > We have initial implementations of collation and number formatting APIs > for PHP 5, which will be publicly available soon. PHP 6 implementation and > other APIs will follow. The project code will be available through PECL. > > The project is supported by LiveNation, Yahoo! and Zend Technologies. > > We welcome all feedback about the project - especially suggestions about > what functionality is needed and comments about existing implementation. > > We intend to discuss it on the PHP Internationalization list - > php-i18n@lists.php.net. We welcome you to join the list and participate in > the discussion. We will publish API descriptions for existing functions on > the i18n list in a couple of days, to start the things rolling. > > Regards, > PHP-ICU team > -- > Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect > stas@zend.com http://www.zend.com/ > (408)253-8829 MSN: stas@zend.com