The document discusses timezones and internationalization (i18n). It provides background on the history of timezones, how they are defined and formatted, and challenges around timezones like daylight saving time and political changes. It also discusses i18n topics like Unicode, encodings, locales, and using resource bundles to support multiple languages.

1. There’s a time & a place...
Mysteries and fun facts around locales and timezones
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2. Me
Monday, 14 October 13

3. Monday, 14 October 13

4. Kai Koenig
Working with CFML since 1999
Developing for mobile since 2003
Recovering Flex developer being sucked into JS deeper and deeper
Recently rediscovered Functional Programming and sometimes
enjoy dabbling with formal aspects of computer science
bloginblack.de
2ddu.com
twitter.com/agentK
Monday, 14 October 13

5. So...what’s this about
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6. Motivational Speech
•
•
The world is larger than you might think
People...
...live in different places, speak and read diffent
scripts
•
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•
...have and are used to different cultures - those
might be significantly different from what one is
used to him- or herself

7. Examples?
• Time, Timezones, Boundaries, DST
• Text, Languages, Translations, Reading Dir
• Cultures: meaning of colours, images,
artwork, social context
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8. i18n,l10n,g11n
• i18n - internationalisation
• designing software so that it can be
adapted to various languages
• l10n - localisation
• adapting software for region, time,
language etc
• g11n - globalisation
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9. I’m fascinated about
and interested in i18n
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10. Timezone research
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11. What is time and what
are timezones?
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12. History
• Before clocks, people marked the time
based on the sun.
• Later with mechanical clocks: apparent vs
mean solar time.
• Railroad time - travel and communication
made solar time awkward.
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13. History
• Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) - started
1675 as a local solar time
• Railway companies started to use GMT
with portable chronometers since the
1840s.
• Time zones were a compromise.
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14. History
• November 1868: New Zealand Mean Time
(GMT+11:30)
• Late 1860s/1870s-1900: USA introduce
Railroad times, 4 major time zones
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15. History
• Worldwide time zones: Italian
mathematician Filopanti suggested a 24hr
time zone system centered in Rome (1858)
• By ~1900 most of Earth had standard time
zones, not necessarily in brackets of one
hour
• Today: Full hour, 1/2 hour and 1/4 hour time
zones
• Also: politics play a big part
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16. GMT vs UTC
• GMT: Mean solar time at the meridian
passing through the Royal Observatory in
Greenwich
• UTC: Atomic time that includes leap
seconds, guaranteed to always be within 0.9
seconds of the old GMT
• UTC is known as Zulu time
• Fun fact: Earth’s rotation is slowing - we
need more leap seconds!
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17. Each timezone is 15 degrees longitude wide.
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18. Time formats
• 09:30 UTC would usually be 09:30Z or
0930Z
• 14:45:15 UTC -> 14:45:15Z or 144515Z
• Offsets:
• +/-03:00 or +/-0300 or +/-03
• Stuff like MEST, NZDT, BST etc are made
up and not standardised.
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19. Timezones in Java
• TZ Database: IANA Time Zone Database
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tz_database)
• Set of text files that can be read and used
with the right tools. It’s safe to assume you
don’t have those tools and don’t care.
• A JVM comes with a copy of the TZ
Database built-in.
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20. Timezones in Java
• It contains historic and current information
on timezones for various locations at any
time of the year.
• More: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/
java/javase/timezones-137583.html
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21. Updating TZ data
• It’s important to update your JVM’s
timezone database regularly.
• Time legislation changes over the years:
• DST start/end dates
• Political changes
• Example: CF 9 shipped with Java 1.6.0_10
--- that’s time zone data from 2008
(v2008c)
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22. Oddities
• Samoa skipped 30/12/2011.
Why - any guesses?
• While doing that, they also
changed from driving on the
right-hand side of the road
to the left-hand side.
• Tokelau copied their move a
year later.
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23. Oddities
• Chatham Islands are part of
New Zealand.
• Timezone is UTC+1275
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24. Oddities
• Australian Central
Western Time - UTC
+0845
• Self-proclaimed
timezone by 5
settlements in the
desert.
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25. Oddities
•
•
Time zones
can even cross
counties
•
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Time zones
cross states
Worst
offenders:
Kentucky &
Indiana

26. Smallest multi-timezone
location?
• This is the
island of
Markets Fyr in
the Baltic Sea
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27. Other Oddities
• Russia changed all their timezones in 2010
and again in 2011 - created a huge issue for
a lot of the users of one of my clients
(Russian/Ukrainian-focussed sites).
• Fun fact: Railway timetables in Russia are
always in Moscow time. Airport data is in
local time.
• The International Space Station uses UTC.
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28. Daylight Savings
• DST occurs when a country/region decides
to wind their clocks forward one hour to
make most of the available sunlight.
• Lord Howe (AU) has a DST of +0030
• Some other areas in Australia ignore DST mainly West Australia and Queensland --too many farmers.
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29. Time and CFML/JS
• CFML: Use Paul Hastings’ TZ CFC
• JS: http://pellepim.bitbucket.org/jstz
• The main issue in the JS world is
detecting DST properly
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30. i18n and Unicode
• The problem of i18n is reasonably solved –
a good part of the solution is Unicode
• Joel Spolsky in 2003: “If you are a
programmer working in 2003 and you don't
know the basics of characters, character
sets, encodings, and Unicode, and I catch
you, I'm going to punish you by making you
peel onions for 6 months in a submarine. I
swear I will.”
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31. Unicode in 1 slide
• Concept of “platonic letters”. A is different
from a or B, but not from A.
• Every platonic letter has a magic number
(code point): U+0639
• U+0048 U+0065 U+006C U+006C U
+006F
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32. Encodings in 1 slide
•
•
•
•
00 48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F
•
•
There are more: UTF-16, UTF-7, UCS-2, UCS-4
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48 00 65 00 6C 00 6C 00 6F 00
Unicode BOM designator: FE FF or FF FE
UTF-8: System to store Unicode in 8 bit bytes
(code points 0-127 are identical to US-ASCII), 1-4
octets depending on the platonic letter
Important message here: There shouldn’t be any
text without encoding information floating
around…

33. Encodings and web
• Does that sound familiar?
• “I’ve got question marks on your
website.”
• “Where do those boxes come from?”
• How do we work with encodings on the
web?
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=utf-8”>
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34. Encodings & CFML
• Railo and ACF support Unicode and
UTF-8. But there’s more to it – how about
your DB content?
• i18n has a larger scope than just CFML !!!
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35. Encodings & CFML
• Best practice: Use UTF-8 encoding
• If you have to read non-standard encoded
content, use the following:
• <cfprocessingdirective
pageencoding=“utf-8“>
• Unfortunately you’d have to put it on every
single page…
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36. Encodings & CFML
• Some more concerns:
• Non-default output: <cfcontent
type="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
• Form/URL-Scope: setEncoding("URL",
"utf-8")
• Various tags support encoding
information: <cffile> etc.
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37. Locales
• A locale is a set of parameters that defines
the user's language, country and any special
variant preferences that the user wants to
see in their user interface. Usually a locale
identifier consists of at least a language
identifier and a region identifier.
• Java: de_DE, en_AU, en_NZ, de_CH,
mi_NZ etc..
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38. Locales
• Locale “stack”:
• The operating system provides a system
locale
• JVM under the hood picks up the locale
of the OS – unless you provide a different
locale at start-up of your JVM instance
• JVM: -Duser.language=de -Duser.region=DE
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39. Resource Bundles
• Preparing your code for using RBs is a defacto standard approach of implementing
locales and building i18n apps.
• Creating RB for different locales would be
considered to be a l10n task.
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40. Resource Bundles
• …are not much more than POTFs (identified
via locales):
#RB: testJavaRB.properties
Cancel=Cancel
Go=Ok
#RB: testJavaRB_th_TH.properties
Cancel=u0E22u0E01u0E40u0E25u0E34u0E01
Go=u0E44u0E1B
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41. Resource Bundles in
CFML
• No need to re-invent the wheel. Paul
Hastings (http://www.sustainablegis.com/
things.cfm) has ported a lot of Java-based
RB-related solutions over to CFML.
• Lots of other i18n- and GIS-related work,
too!
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42. UI considerations
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43. UI considerations
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44. Get in touch
Twitter: @AgentK
Blog: http://bloginblack.de
Podcast (2 Developers Down Under): http://2ddu.com
About me: http://about.me/agentk
Monday, 14 October 13