Importance Of Globalization In Coldfusion Applications; How Coldfusion Mx Supports Globalization; Character Sets, Character Encodings, And Locales - MACROMEDIA COLDFUSION MX 61-DEVELOPING COLDFUSION MX Develop Manual

Importance of globalization in ColdFusion applications

The Internet has no country boundaries. Customers can access websites from anywhere in the
world, at any time, or on any date. Unless you want to lock your customers into using a single
language, such as English, to access your site, you should consider globalization issues.
One reason to globalize your applications is to avoid errors and confusion for your customers. For
example, a date in the form 1/2/2003 is interpreted as January 2, 2003 in the United States, but
as February 1, 2003 in European countries.
Another reason to globalize your applications is to display currencies in the correct format. Think
of how your customers would feel when they find out the correct price for an item is 15,000
American dollars, not 15,000 Mexican pesos (about 1600 American dollars).
Your website can also accept customer feedback or some other form of text input. You might want
to support that feedback in multiple languages using a variety of character sets.

How ColdFusion MX supports globalization

ColdFusion MX is implemented in Java. As a Java application, ColdFusion MX uses Java
globalization features. For example, ColdFusion MX stores all strings internally using the
Unicode character set. Because it uses Unicode, ColdFusion can represent any text data from any
language.
In addition, ColdFusion MX includes many tags and functions designed to support globalizing
your applications. You can use these tags and functions to set locales, convert date and currency
formats, control the output encoding of ColdFusion pages, and perform other actions.

Character sets, character encodings, and locales

When you discuss globalization issues, two topics that you must consider are the character sets or
character encodings recognized by the application and the locales for which the application must
format data.
A character set is a collection of characters. For example, the Latin alphabet is the character set that
you use to write English, and it includes all of the lower- and upper-case letters from A to Z. A
character set for French includes the character set used by English, plus special characters such as
"é," "à," and "ç."
The Japanese language uses three alphabets: Hiragana, Katakana, and Kanji. Hiragana and
Katakana are phonetic alphabets that each contain 46 characters plus two accents. Kanji contains
Chinese ideographs adapted to the Japanese language. The Japanese language uses a much larger
character set than English because Japanese supports more than 10,000 different characters.
In order for a ColdFusion application to process text, the application must recognize the character
set used by the text. The character encoding maps between a character set definition and the digital
codes used to represent the data.
In general use, the terms character set (or charset) and character encoding are often used
interchangeably, and most often a specific character encoding encodes one character set. However,
this is not always true; for example, there are multiple encodings of the Unicode character set. For
more information on character encodings, see
Note: ColdFusion uses the term charset to indicate character encoding in some attribute names,
structure field keys, and function parameter names.
"About character encodings" on page
Introduction to globalization
374.
373