Mark Moore

Internationalization (sometimes abbreviated to I18N because there are 18 letters in the word between i and n) is a process by which an application is made independent of any particular language or national preference for date, time, or currency formats. It is the combination of requirements for formats, character sets, and language that make up what is known as a locale. Localization then uses locale-neutral placeholders and the end user's locale to construct a locale-specific presentation. The challenges facing the programmer who must properly internationalize and localize any application are many. In addition to concerns about character encoding, competing demands for screen real estate, and cultural concerns in the choice of things like color, you must, at the very least, ensure that every bit of text in the application is externalized so it can be translated in... (more)

Securing and Authenticating SOAP-Based Web Services

If you are implementing a multiuser system, your system will probably have certain attributes. It may be implemented in a distributed fashion and it may have some sort of security model. In its most basic form, such a system can be represented by a straight line on a piece of paper: below the line is the information, content, data (call it what you will); and above the line are the various individuals, groups, and roles that need to work with what is below the line. We connect clients above the line to the data below it by exposing services that provide access through the line. ... (more)

Sending Out-of-Band Messages to SOAP-Based Web Services

SOAP, the Simple Object Access Protocol, is a lightweight toolkit for building Web services. It is an amalgam of ubiquitous technologies - HTTP and XML. Though the likes of Microsoft, IBM, and the Apache Software Foundation normally have little in common, all support it as a foundation for deploying Web services. One of the great advantages of SOAP's lightweight nature is the simplicity of server-side programming. A SOAP service needs no knowledge of the SOAP environment. In fact, just about any Java class that exposes public methods can be turned into a SOAP service. Unfortunat... (more)