Research And Application Of Multilingual Web Services

With the development of global e-business, the problem of globalization is growing: how to stand firmly in the extended strange market, how to cooperate effectively with employees, suppliers and distributors with different culture and how to build consistent and localized globalization system, make people recognize the importance and advantages of globalization application. UN Secretary General, Kofi Annan, has correctly asserted, "...globalization is 'an irreversible process, not an option.' " One of the key factors of globalization is to provide multi-language. Internet expands traditional business scope to the global. Multi-language provided by web site can attracts more customers, therefore, more business opportunities will be gained, and e-business will grow quickly. But on the other hand, the more languages a web site supported, the more workload of development and maintenance will be. Therefore, multi-language often means dramatically increasing cost. How to balance them? How to provide the most effective multilingual application with the lowest cost to meet customer culture requirements based on customized user interface becomes an ultimate challenge.The thesis cites the five interrelated base requirements in the IBM e-business globalization architecture to answer the question. The five base requirements are: single executable, locale model, multilingual data (Unicode support), localization pack, and input and output of multilingual date. A globalized application must meet the five interrelated base requirements at least.As a compelling solution to integrate enterprise applications, web services must support globalized e-business dramatically. To meet the requirement, IBM provides web services globalization model. But the thesis has a different view on the model. The thesis point out that, for a globalized web service, it should have the ability to be invoked by a service requestor both in a globalized running environment who meets the above five base requirements, and in a single locale running environment who doesn't meet them, which is different from what IBM's globalization model haspointed out: Both service provider and service requestor should establish globalization environment based on the five base requirements. Although this alteration increases the requirement to web service providers, it decreases the requirement to the running environment of web service requestor greatly, enlarges the scope which globalized web services are applied to and meets the loose-coupled attribute of web services.The thesis uses a case "Globalized Report Web Service" to prove the author's view. The web service in the case uses the architecture JSF+Spring+Hibernate, has globalization attributes, and it can be invoked by a service requestor both in globalization environment and in non-globalization environment. In the end of the case, the thesis concludes the way to wrap the globalized web service: a single locale running environment can be viewed as a globalization environment which supports only one locale. When the globalized web service is designed, globalization attributes should be avoided. In this way, globalized web service can run in the totally different environment.In the end, the thesis analyzes the limits of the model and the methodology provided by the author, and views the related subjects. It's believed that globalized web services will play a more and more important role in the near future.