Welcome to the future of I18n in Ruby on Rails!

2009-06-02T14:06:54+02:00

After we’ve been engaged in the Rails I18n Group since September last year we learned that in the RailsEnvy video RailsConf in 36 minutes Jeremy Kemper, when asked what upcoming features that didn’t make it into Rails 2.1 he’d forsee on edge in the “next couple of weeks”, says that “Internationalization will be solved”.

Of course this sentence raised some eyebrows on our side at first but when we asked Jeremy on #rails-contrib about the interview he explained that he actually had been cracking a joke. We could have easily known that because shortly after he also announced that “Rails will scale” as an upcoming feature. Ha! ;)

Nonetheless this interview sparked quite some additional motivation of finally getting our patch done because we felt affirmed in our goals and Jeremy even joined our Google Group in order to help us getting the patch done as soon as possible. Finally, on July 17th, Jeremy merged our work back into Rails. We published a blog article about the technical details and API as well as the history and motiviation of our work.

Of course this merge raised quite some attention. Our work got mentioned on such hightraffic blogs like Riding Rails, Ryan’s Scraps, Rails Inside and the RailsEnvy Podcast. The member count of our Google Group consequently exploded and people started playing with the API.

Trevor Turk was the first to provide a walkthrough for how to do Simple Localization in Rails 2.2 and Iain Hecker published a plugin for storing translations in YAML files shortly after as well as a plugin for parsing the HTTP Accept Language header.

We also learned with great pleasure about the attention that these changes raised amongst Rails developers in Japan which is particulary awesome because Rails I18n development so far was quite segmented in the US/European and the Asian world.

So, these are exciting times for Rails I18n. Stay tuned! Or better yet: Get involved!

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Welcome to the future of I18n in Ruby on Rails!