14 DAY TRIAL // A new project from Microsoft is designed to enable developers to easily internationalize their JavaScript applications. The new jQuery Globalization Plugin is only a prototype for the time being, but early adopters can already start leveraging the resources in order to enhance their JS apps with globalization support. The jQuery Globalization Plugin offers more proof of the Redmond company’s commitment to the jQuery project, on top of the work the software giant did in relation to Visual Studio 2010 and .Net Framework 4.
“This plugin includes globalization information for over 350 cultures ranging from Scottish Gaelic, Frisian, Hungarian, Japanese, to Canadian English. We will be releasing this plugin to the community as open-source. You can download our prototype for the jQuery Globalization plugin from our Github repository. You can also download a set of samples that demonstrate some simple use-cases with it,” Scott Guthrie, corporate vice president, .NET Developer Platform, reveals.
Developers working on applications for international audiences might need to tailor their JavaScript code to specific languages around the world. With the jQuery Globalization Plugin, a variety of linguistic-specific details can easily be dealt with, including parsing and formatting numbers, currencies, and dates.
Guthrie notes that Microsoft’s participation in the jQuery community is ongoing, and that, taking into account the jQuery Globalization Plugin, the Redmond company has released a total of three jQuery plugins. However, the software giant is not alone in its efforts, as both the jQuery and jQuery UI teams have helped with the creation of the plugins.
“Each language, and the countries that speak that language, have different expectations when it comes to how numbers (including currency and percentages) and dates should appear. Obviously, each language has different names for the days of the week and the months of the year. But they also have different expectations to the structure of dates, such [as] what order the day, month and year are in. In number formatting, not only does the character used delineate number groupings and the decimal portion, but the placement of those characters differ,” an excerpt from the jQuery Globalization Plugin’s description reads.
“A user using an application should be able to read and write dates and numbers in the format they are accustomed to. This plugin makes this possible, providing an API to convert user-entered numbers and dates -- in their own format -- into real numbers and dates, and conversely, to format numbers and dates into that format,” it is added in the description.
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