Welcome to the future of I18n in Ruby on Rails!

posted by Sven on July 31, 2008 20:58

When it comes to I18n support in Ruby on Rails there has a lot been going on in the last couple of weeks … and we expect it to become even more vibrant with the release of Rails 2.2 which is expected for the Rails Conf Europe in early September.

We’ve set up this website to keep track of all the news and provide a central resource for Internationalization in Ruby on Rails.

For starters here’s a short list of what happened in the last couple of weeks.

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!

7 Comments

  1. The dude said on August 02, 2008 12:45

    So, let’s test comments, dude …

    The Big Lebowski: What makes a man, Mr. Lebowski?
    The Dude: Dude.
    The Big Lebowski: Huh?
    The Dude: Uhh… I don’t know sir.
    The Big Lebowski: Is it being prepared to do the right thing, whatever the cost? Isn’t that what makes a man?
    The Dude: Hmmm… Sure, that and a pair of testicles.

    #

  2. Iain said on August 02, 2008 20:02

    I forgot my adapter for my laptop at my work Friday (at the other end of the country). And to make matters worse one of my hard drives in my servers crashed. So that leaves me with no dev-environment this weekend.

    Will be contributing monday again!

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  3. Sven said on August 02, 2008 20:50

    Hey Iain!

    Thanks for all the work already. And all the best for your hardware :)

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  4. Trevor Turk said on August 03, 2008 15:57

    Awesome to have a site to follow the news now! The feed was a little hard to find from this page, though :)

    http://rails-i18n.org/home.atom

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  5. Sven said on August 03, 2008 18:52

    Hey Trevor,

    yeah, these are the small things I meant ;)

    I’ve added an auto_discovery_link for the blog for now. Should also add a feed icon to the footer, I guess.

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  6. windlyun said on October 31, 2008 07:31

    Hey,all

    I am interesting in Ruby on Rails, even though I am a rookie about it. I have a quick question: how to do the testing about the Rails on my computer? I meant the testing process or testing model. I found that some guys said if I want to contribute Rails, firstly I need to get the Rails source code, then set up and run tests, last write my code and update my copy of Rails. What kind of tests here?

    Thank you.

    #

  7. windlyun said on October 31, 2008 07:35

    Hey,all

    I am interesting in Ruby on Rails, even though I am a rookie about it. I have a quick question: how to do the testing about the Rails on my computer? I meant the testing process or testing model. I found that some guys said if I want to contribute Rails, firstly I need to get the Rails source code, then set up and run tests, last write my code and update my copy of Rails. What kind of tests here?

    Thank you.

    #

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