Finally. Ruby on Rails gets internationalized

posted: July 19th, 2008 · by: Sven

in: Globalization, Programming · tagged as: , , ·  54 comments »

So, it’s getting real. Our changes to Rails have been merged back into master and will be released with Rails 2.2.

We’ve started this project in September 07. A couple of I18n plugin developers gathered to implement a Rails core patch which should make our lifes easier. We agreed on the following goal:

“Our goal with this work is to eliminate the need for monkey patching Rails in order to internationalize an application. We want to achieve this by implementing a minimal, common I18n API that can be leveraged by all I18n/L10n solutions.”

In hindsight we’ve initially tried to accomplish way to much. Everybody brought their experience and thinking about “good I18n practices” to the table - which proved extremely valuable because it forced everbody to push their own horizon. But it also resulted in something that would have been “just another Rails I18n solution” … build right into Rails. As such it would not have fully satisfied every one of us. Too heavyweight, too complicated, just too much of everything.

So with the beginning of 2008 our work slowed down, good new ideas kept popping up but eventually the project completely stalled and people focussed on other business. Apparently we needed a creative break.

Then in May we went back to the drawing board and came up with a fresh approach based on our previous experience. Now all of a sudden we were able to agree on a very slim and minimal implementation of our concepts that covers all of our requirements: it works as a Ruby gem and is suited not only for use in Rails, it adds only minimal load to Rails core and it still implements the common api that will allow I18n solutions to build on.

To me this project already proved extremely interesting and educating. Almost all of the ideas that are now implemented have been already present in our discussions last year. But even though we’ve went through lots of lots of discussions we initially just haven’t been able to shave the whole yak fur down to this minimal level.

I guess all of us learned a great deal about I18n. In fact some of us (including me) completely changed their minds about what’s useful, good practice and common need … and more importantly: what really can be omitted.

So, what’s in the box? And what’s not?

First of all, there still won’t be a fullblown one-fits-all I18n/L10n solution in Rails. Please, understand that. Rails still won’t be able to translate your application to your language as long it’s not very similar to US English.

Instead, Rails continues to be what it always was: a framework localized to en-US. But this time with a twist: it is also internationalized.

That means: all hardcoded message strings and logic that we’ve previously been monkey patching in all of our plugins are now abstracted out of the Rails core code (which we mean by the process of “internationalization”) and stored in a central place, accessible through a common interface.

We worked hard to stick to the principle of doing “the simplest thing that ever could work” with this. Rails itself won’t provide means to localize an application to anything else than en-US. Instead it ships with a solution that gets the job done and walks away.

Rails will ship with our I18n Ruby gem which consists of two parts:

  • The first part is the API itself which is just a Ruby module with a bunch of methods that will be used by Rails and delegate all requests to a backend.
  • The second part is the Simple backend which implements whatever is necessary to re-localize Rails back to en-US.

The Simple backend acutally might also work for simple localization tasks such as translating an error message to another language, but, really, that’s a side effect.

So what do we win?

The whole point of the exercise is: the Simple backend can be swapped with a different implementation that supports the same API. Future Rails I18n plugins will do exactly that.

E.g. there certainly will be backends that provide different pluralization rules, more powerful means to localize dates and numbers, persist translations in other formats (e.g. Gettext files or in the database). There might be backends that themselves provide some kind of a framework to support pluggable extensions and custom solutions for certain locales etc.

So if we still need to rely on plugins for our fullblown L10n support, what do we win then?

The short answer: A lot!

In the past I18n developers implemented their solutions for the same problems again and again. Our repeatedly reinvented wheels came with different flavours of syntax sugar and different bikeshed colors of monkey patches. The latter repeatedly broke when Rails moved by a millimeter and plugin developers had to fix their stuff.

I’m not saying that this situation was all bad. Actually I really believe that it was necessary for Rails’ ecosystem to experiment with all of these solutions. But we’ve arrived at a point where we can move on.

So with this patch applied Rails I18n developers can now build on what was extracted from former experience. Instead of reimplementing things over and over again they can focus on some of the more challenging features like localized inflections, special formattings for strings, dates, numbers etc.

We also hope that future solutions will be more exchangeable and pluggable. There hopefully won’t be the need to stick to a certain solution anymore just because it’s the only one supporting inflections for a certain locale. Or the only one with a strong Gettext backend. Or whatever special feature comes to mind.

Of course that’s still a long road ahead. But we believe that this step, the merge of the work of the “Rails I18n group”, will help a lot on the journey.

Get involved!

If you’d like to join us working on Ruby on Rails’s future I18n support, provide feedback or ask questions please do so! You can find our Google Group over at http://groups.google.com/group/rails-i18n.

This solution was developed by the Rails I18n group consisting of Matt Aimonetti, Joshua Harvey, Saimon Moore, Stephan Soller and myself, with the additional work, help and feedback of many other Rails I18n developers including Tore Darell, Chris Eppstein, Luca Guidi Samuel Lown Yaroslav Markin, Joshua Sierles, Julian ‘Julik’ Tarkhanov and others.

Leave a comment

54 Comments

  1. Saimon Moore said July 19th, 2008 at 02:57 PM  

    Yay :)

    Congrats to all…

  2. Trevor Turk said July 19th, 2008 at 08:01 PM  

    Congrats, and thanks so much for working to get this stuff into core!

  3. Torsten Becker said July 21st, 2008 at 10:51 AM  

    Congratulations! Job very well done!

  4. ruby on rails developer said August 12th, 2008 at 05:28 PM  

    Congratulations, and keep up the good work. I’ve not needed internationalization yet… but no doubt when the time comes I’ll be forever in your debt.

  5. txapelgorri said August 28th, 2008 at 09:02 PM  

    Congratulations:

    I recently start with Rails, and everything seems to be sweet and calm, but I’ve realized that localization is the first big rock on my road. I hope this project to be the right step into the right direction.

  6. Simon H said October 30th, 2008 at 10:42 AM  

    I’m excite to see Ruby moving towards better l10n support, but I’m confused by the language you use to describe your work - you’ve repeatedly mixed the terms i18n and l10n in the text above, but you only seem to be describing l10n features - translation, pluralisation etc. Are you doing any work relating to character sets, Unicode, etc? I came here from http://rails-i18n.org and I noticed the same problem over there - lots of talk about “Internationalization will be solved”, but only solutions for l10n problems.

    Am I missing something?

  7. grosser said February 21st, 2009 at 01:44 PM  

    there finally is a gettext based solution for rails i18n:

    fast+threadsave+simple Gettext http://github.com/grosser/fast_gettext

    2.2+ rails plugin for gettext and i18n http://github.com/grosser/gettexti18nrails

    Example 2.3 application fastgettext+i18n http://github.com/grosser/gettexti18nrailsexample

  8. Sven said April 8th, 2009 at 04:13 PM  

    Thanks for the headsup, Michael!

    I’ve added these links to the rails-i18n wiki: http://rails-i18n.org/wiki

  9. Exchange said September 15th, 2010 at 04:06 AM  

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  11. StevenToff said February 3rd, 2011 at 09:47 AM  

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  12. Alison said February 3rd, 2011 at 06:39 PM  

    As you know that I don’t need rails right now (which btw, I have no knowledge in). I just need to work in plain ruby. I don’t know how internationalization is dealt with in regular ruby. Can someone throw some light on this? Anti Aging

  13. Lisa said February 8th, 2011 at 10:43 AM  

    Yes thanks that was a great read. I’ve been thinking about this recently myself. It’s interesting that I happened to read this today.

    I also saw a ruby post on this learning site which I thought was interesting.

  14. Fleet said February 19th, 2011 at 06:59 AM  

    Excellent content there Sven, you make it all sound so easy ha ha. Keep up the great work friend.:)

  15. cat owner forums said February 20th, 2011 at 08:30 PM  

    First of all, there still won’t be a fullblown one-fits-all I18n/L10n solution in Rails. Please, understand that. Rails still won’t be able to translate your application to your language as long it’s not very similar to US English.

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