I’m new to ruby and rails. I need support for for localized pages, pages
with multilingual content, international date/time formats, and calendar
and time zone calculations.
Initially, I asked someone on the ICU project http://www.icu-project.org/ and they directed me to ICU4R http://icu4r.rubyforge.org/. I thought that this was my solution until
I scrolled down and found this comment:
“The code is slow and inefficient yet, is still highly experimental,
so can have many security and memory leaks, bugs, inconsistent
documentation, incomplete test suite. Use it at your own risk.”
Globalize http://www.globalize-rails.org/globalize/ looks very
up-to-date and well supported. And every time I ask people about
internationalization options, they seem to either mention Globalize or
say that they don’t know.
Is Globalize the most widely used option? Do people on this list
recommend Globalize or other options?
Is Globalize the most widely used option? Do people on this list
recommend Globalize or other options?
Globalize is probably is one of the most widely used solutions for
internationalisation in Rails, given, as you say, it is well looked
after and provides a very easy solution to integrate with your Rails
project.
However, I suspect most people are slightly suspicious about the way
translations are handled, everything in Globalize is stored in three
tables, including one master table that contains all of your
translations in every language. If your into wanting to make DB access
as minimal and efficient as possible, like me, then this may or may not
ring bells. Personally, I now use Gettext for all of my web application
texts, as its very mature and while initially it takes a bit of
understanding, it offers the most complete solutions for handling
strings. Having said that, I did use Globalize in one major project and
it works great!
One thing you should bare in mind, is the distinction between
translating the application (the text in the views) and the data models.
Globalize will throw these together in the same basket, but I’m not
convinced this is an ideal solution. Checkout my plugin
‘translate_columns’ for a description of the problems and a solution
that I came up with: