I'm building a Open Source product and I thinking about Localization, I've read about gettext but there seems to be a lot of problem to get it to work in different systems (servers,os etc).
How would you handle this? Is there a secure way to help gettext work on several systems? Perhaps it already is?
Regards from Sweden / Tobias
this is what im doing in my cms:
each plugin/program/entity (you name it) i develop, i create a /translations folder.JSON.parse them)a data column of TEXT datatype)json_decode() to the whole result to get it once; then put it in a $_SESSION so the next time to get flash-speed translated strings for current selected language.the whole thing was developed having i mind both performance and compatibility.
in your case a row in such file could be like:
in en.txt
{"id":"LNG_1","str":"My word"}
in de.txt
{"id":"LNG_1","str":"Mein Wort"}
The current language could be stored in session like $_SESSION["language"]; and use that as starting point. Then, you can read translations like:
lang("LNG_1");
I would use gettext, since it's a mature system and provides features like singular/plural versions of translations. To be not dependant on the availability of the php extension, you should fall back to http://launchpad.net/php-gettext which provides a pure php implementation of gettext.
gettext has also the big advantage that dozens of tools exist that make it easy to translate those files.
Ok, I basically ended up writing a mo file parser based on Zend's Gettext Adapter, as far as I know gettext is pretty much reliant upon the locale, so manually parsing the .mo file would save the hassle of running into odd circumstances with locale issues with setlocale. I also plan on parsing the Zend Locale data provided in the form of xml files.
A lot of CMS uses the array version. I have seen GetText as well for scalable applications. The array version is simpler especially when you want to manage the translation from a web interface.
It is a matter of preference of course.
I recommend you take a look at Zend_translate, Zend_locale and Zend_Date. I'm only starting to dabble with them myself, but to me, they already look like a really good, clean and modern solution to internationalization, in contrast to the chaos that is gettext.
The introduction to Zend_translate lists a number of strong arguments why to choose it (or something similar) over gettext.