I have not, generally speaking, been a "flasher" (for the last few years at least!)

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2010/02/24 07:01 -05:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2010/02/24/9968410.aspx

This is not a post about flashing people while telling them how to be more world ready with their code!

This is, however, a post about Adobe's Flash.

Not about the whole Apple/Adobe HTML5/Flash thing that everyone else is writing about that is so controversial.

As fascinating as that may be for some.

For the record, none of my friends at Apple, Adobe, or Microsoft find that stuff to be something fun to engage on, but clearly there are people somewhere having a good time with it. I don't personally know any of them as far as I know.

Anyway, this is about something my friend Mihai at Adobe told me about.

You see, for as long as I have known about/dealt with Flash, what I have found most frustrating was the lack of globalization support.

It drove me nuts, in fact, any time I had to deal with it (some high profile web sites I was helping people with had major issues because of this lack!).

But no longer.

Enter flash.globalization!

This is a really amazing set of classes. Check it out:

	Class	Description
	Collator	The Collator class provides locale-sensitive string comparison capabilities.
	CollatorMode	The CollatorMode class enumerates constant values that govern the behavior of string comparisons performed by a Collator object.
	CurrencyFormatter	The CurrencyFormatter class provides locale-sensitive formatting and parsing of currency values.
	CurrencyParseResult	A data structure that represents a currency amount and currency symbol or string that were extracted by parsing a currency value.
	DateTimeFormatter	The DateTimeFormatter class provides locale-sensitive formatting for Date objects and access to localized date field names.
	DateTimeNameContext	The DateTimeNameContext class enumerates constant values representing the formatting context in which a month name or weekday name will be used.
	DateTimeNameStyle	The DateTimeNameStyle class enumerates constants that control the length of the month names and weekday names that are used when formatting dates.
	DateTimeStyle	Enumerates constants that determine a locale-specific date and time formatting pattern.
	LastOperationStatus	The LastOperationStatus class enumerates constant values that represent the status of the most recent globalization service operation.
	LocaleID	The LocaleID class provides methods for parsing and using locale ID names.
	NationalDigitsType	The NationalDigitsType class enumerates constants that indicate digit sets used by the NumberFormatter class.
	NumberFormatter	The NumberFormatter class provides locale-sensitive formatting and parsing of numeric values.
	NumberParseResult	A data structure that holds information about a number that was extracted by parsing a string.
	StringTools	The StringTools class provides locale-sensitive case conversion methods.

Mihai gave me some of the skinny on the internal, and in some ways it is similar to Silverlight as it uses the underlying platform it is running on for a lot of the support (as I talked about Silverlight doing back in blogs like Shine a Little [Silver]Light). Though in the case of flash.globalization, if the platform lacks a solid story then it falls back to ICU. This does not apply to Windows, where the existing support is used.

It supports custom cultures/custom locales!

It is all name based, using the RFC!

Not even the newest version of Office (due out soon?) can say that, and they have an XML-based standard and over a decade of notice about doing that....

And there were other interesting bonuses I found out from Mihai when talking about flash.globalization. Like remember LOCALE_SDECIMAL? Quite a character! Or two. Or three... from the other day? The one that broke the new Windows Calculator and has caused problems for Excel and other parts of Microsoft products?

Well flash.globalization can handle multiple characters in those locale fields like LOCALE_SDECIMAL and LOCALE_STHOUSAND and so forth. In parsing and formatting.

I'll need to check on things like LOCALE_SDATE and LOCALE_STIME to make sure they work too, though I must admit I am optimistic that if there is a bug I won't be fielding questions about whether such things really happen in shipping locales. No offense to people who might be inclined to do that, of course! :-)

Here is another reference if you are hungry for information in it:

The flash.globalization package in Flash Player: Cultural diversity without complexity

Some very cool information here about using it for those who might be interested.

Anyway, thinking about a third party component that is able to consume so much of the functionality that I have been working with, on, in, and around for so long to improve the story on a platform that used to not do any of this is really really exciting!

# Tom on 24 Feb 2010 9:53 AM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 24 Feb 2010 1:00 PM:

# Mihai on 27 Feb 2010 12:00 PM:

# Michael S. Kaplan on 27 Feb 2010 1:51 PM:

Pavanaja U B on 22 Mar 2010 10:11 PM:

Mihai on 18 Jun 2010 3:48 PM:

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