Localization

To make your pages available to a wider audience, localization is absolutly neccesary. Nitro provides you with some simple mechanismn for translating your application.

Changelog: 24.05.06: Update to comply to new nitro (transformation_pipeline)

First, in your run.rb, you have to change the compiler-pipeline so it includes Localization - this was never added to the standard-pipeline and the compilers are still being thought over, so for now, do it like that :)

Also, to initialize the localization you have to add a hash. This really invites you to save your localization in an external YAML-file so that other people can edit it quite simple too.

locales = {
  :en => {
  'hello world' => "Hello world",
  'hello' => "hello",
  :Hello => "Hello",
  :world => "world",
  :welcome => 'Welcome on my Homepage',
  :exclamation_mark => "!"
},
  :de => {
  'hello world' => "Hallo Welt",
  'hello' => "hallo",
  :Hello => "Hallo",
  :world => "Welt",
  :welcome => 'Willkommen auf meiner Homepage!',
  :exclamation_mark => "!"
}
}

Glue::Localization.add(locales)

module Nitro
  class Controller
    ann :self, :transformation_pipeline => [
                                             StaticInclude, Morphing, Elements, 
                                             Markup, ScriptCompiler, Localization, 
                                             Cleanup
                                           ]
  end
end

Your Controller should look like:

class MainController < Nitro::Controller
  wrap LocalizationAspect, :pre => :localize
  @lc = Glue::Localization.get

  def toggle_locales
    session[:LOCALE] = ((session[:LOCALE] == :de) ? :en : :de)
    redirect_referer
  end
end

And add a little link to your skin/template that points to locales_toggle so you can... yeah, toggle your locales. If you want to use locales in your Controller you can access it through the @lc-hash that holds your current locales depending on the content of session[:LOCALE]

def index
  @title = @lc[:welcome]
end

and your Templates can use it via the double-brackets [[]] which looks like this (using Symbols):

[[:Hello]] [[:world]][[:exclamation_mark]]

Then you will be rewarded by:

session[:LOCALE] = :en
@lc[:world]
#=> "Hello world!"
session[:LOCALE] = :de
@lc[:world]
#=> "Hallo Welt!"

Using Strings:

[[hello world]]

Will get you

session[:LOCALE] = :en
"Hello world!"
session[:LOCALE] = :de
"Hallo Welt!"

Also you can use both symbols or strings as Hash-keys, you should use what you like more, using strings you can have a more natural feeling in the templates since you can put spaces between the words, Symbols would be the right choice if you have a huge application with lots of requests since it has some performance-gains.

Check "Symbols are not immutable Strings":http://onestepback.org/index.cgi/Tech/Ruby/SymbolsAreNotImmutableStrings.red to find out more about Symbols vs. Strings