Newsgroups: php.i18n,php.internals
Path: news.php.net
Xref: news.php.net php.i18n:1079 php.internals:30938
Mailing-List: contact internals-help@lists.php.net; run by ezmlm
Message-ID: <B2.49.05977.7FC29964@pb1.pair.com>
To: php-i18n@lists.php.net,internals@lists.php.net
Reply-To: "l0t3k" <cshmoove@hotmail.com>
References: <4697D3EA.2090201@zend.com>
Date: Sat, 14 Jul 2007 15:07:33 -0500
Lines: 76
Subject: Re: PHP ICU project announcement
From: cshmoove@hotmail.com ("l0t3k")

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