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Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:35:06 -0700
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Subject: PHP ICU project announcement
From: stas@zend.com (Stanislav Malyshev)

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