[dev] Fwd: [PHP-DEV] PHP ICU project announcement

[Chuck Hagenbuch]

----- Forwarded message from stas at zend.com -----
     Date:  Fri, 13 Jul 2007 12:35:06 -0700
     From: Stanislav Malyshev <stas at zend.com>
  Subject:  [PHP-DEV] PHP ICU project announcement
       To: 'PHP Internals' <internals at lists.php.net>, php-i18n at lists.php.net

Hi all!

We have started a project to make it easier to support international  
markets using PHP. A number of internationalization functions from IBM  
ICU will be made available in PHP as an extension.

This project targets both PHP 5 and PHP 6. The goal is to support the  
most useful i18n services on both, while ensuring that any code  
running in PHP 5 using these functions would work the same in PHP 6.  
The PHP 6
implementation may provide additional functionality.

The demand for internationalization services is large and is needed  
today, so we decided to support them in PHP 5 and provide one common  
solution that will also work going forward. There will be no PHP 4  
support in the project.

The base for the extension is the ICU library
(http://www.icu-project.org/) already used by PHP 6, and the intent is
to follow the ICU model, so that people having experience working
with ICU in either C/C++ or Java could easily use the PHP API.

The extension is composed of mostly independent functionality modules,
each of which would implement one of the functionalities below.
The APIs support both procedural and object-oriented notation
(internally referring to the same APIs). In PHP 5, the extension assumes
all incoming and outgoing strings are in UTF-8 encoding.

The scope of the extension was defined as follows:
- Collation (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/ucol_8h.html)
- Number formatting (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/unum_8h.html)
- Date/time formatting
(http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/udat_8h.html)
- Locales (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/uloc_8h.html)
- Calendars (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/ucal_8h.html)
- International domain names
(http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/uidna_8h.html)
- Message formatting (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/umsg_8h.html)
- Resource bundles (http://www.icu-project.org/apiref/icu4c/ures_8h.html)

We have initial implementations of collation and number formatting  
APIs for PHP 5, which will be publicly available soon. PHP 6  
implementation and other APIs will follow. The project code will be  
available through PECL.

The project is supported by LiveNation, Yahoo! and Zend Technologies.

We welcome all feedback about the project - especially suggestions about
what functionality is needed and comments about existing implementation.

We intend to discuss it on the PHP Internationalization list -
php-i18n at lists.php.net. We welcome you to join the list and  
participate in the discussion. We will publish API descriptions for  
existing functions on the i18n list in a couple of days, to start the  
things rolling.

Regards,
PHP-ICU team
-- 
Stanislav Malyshev, Zend Software Architect
stas at zend.com   http://www.zend.com/
(408)253-8829   MSN: stas at zend.com

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----- End forwarded message -----


-chuck