GWT internationalization of static text & special characters

Question

I've got some questions concerning the internationalization-workarounds for GWT.

1) What's the best way to work with static text that has been directly written in the ui.xml-files? Currently, I'm using the Messages-Interface to translate Java-generated text (which works surprisingly well for me), but our applications have an awful lot of text written directly in HTML.

2) How do you display special characters such as the "ä" used in German? I've already set the index.html to UTF-8 and am still getting weird placeholders instead of the actual characters when accessing the application. I really don't wanna know what happens when I start to use the Chinese translations.

3) Is there any comfortable way to let GWT generate the interface-class from an existing properties-file? I've written myself a small tool that looks good for me, but I suppose that isn't the most professional solution.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

1) In GWT project I worked, for internalization pieces of HTML code in UiBinder, we just inserted InlineLabel's into html. For example:

<table>
<tr>
   <td><g:InlineLabel text="{myMessages.myText}" /></rd>
</tr>
</table>

So inline labels will be translated in plain HTML span elements by GWT. We does not found a better way.

2) For special character use unicode representation in .properties files.

All of the types above use properties files based on the traditional Java properties file format, although GWT uses an enhanced properties file format that allows for UTF-8 and therefore allows properties files to contain Unicode characters directly. See Properties Files paragraph

3) if you are using maven, there is a gwt plugin that can be used to generate a Message interface(also async rpc and css interfaces) by properties file: Generate i18n interfaces for message bundles

Answer 2

Just use unicode of your special cherecters in .properties file