Tuesday 15 July 2008

Openbravo POS Localization

One of the most important Openbravo POS user's demand is to localize Openbravo POS to different countries and cultures worldwide. One part of the localization is the translation of Openbravo POS.

Openbravo POS relies on the Java platform internationalization features for providing the translation of literals and locale parameters like the currency used and date and numbering formatting patterns.

With this technology, to add support for another language to Openbravo POS, is very easy. The new language files are just a set of plain text files that follows the properties syntax, and to install the new language files in Openbravo POS you only need to copy these files in to the Openbravo POS program folder. You do not need neither to compile the source code nor execute a complex process.

Openbravo is focusing on increasing the number of languages supported by Openbravo POS by developing tools and supporting all people that want to collaborate localizing Openbravo POS into new languages.

As a first step we have created a Subversion repository to hold all the language files in development for Openbravo POS, to support all the collaborators to translate the Openbravo POS literals and where everybody can see the progress of the development.

We are going to use this repository to package the language files for Openbravo POS and make them available for download in the Openbravo POS Sourceforge project page.

You can browse this repository going to https://dev.openbravo.com/websvn/localization-pos/translations/ or you can checkout a working copy executing svn co https://dev.openbravo.com/svn/localization-pos/translations/ translations. In the Openbravo POS Localization wiki document you can read about how to localize Openbravo POS, the status of the localization files , the languages that are being developed, the people involved, and how you can collaborate to translate Openbravo POS.

Right now we are trying to align the roadmap of Openbravo POS with the development of the localizations to assure that every future release of Openbravo POS we release also an up-to-date language package for as much languages as possible.

The first milestone we want to achieve is to release the language packages for the current version Openbravo POS 2.10 MP2 on July, 31th. We expect our collaborators and community do to their best to be able to release by that date a collection of language packages that the whole Openbravo POS community around the world enjoy.