An Overview of ICU Helena Shih Chapman hchapman us

An Overview of ICU Helena Shih Chapman hchapman@us. ibm. com Doug Felt dougfelt@us. ibm. com Globalization Center of Competency, Cupertino, CA 19 th International Unicode Conference 1 San Jose, California, September 2001

Agenda • • • What is ICU? Open Source GPL-Compatible Licensing Unicode Standard Conformance Features Performance Architecture Open Development Process References 19 th International Unicode Conference 2 San Jose, California, September 2001

What is ICU? • International programming library • Any language – multiple languages at the same time • High performance features • Cross platform • Unicode standard compliant components • Code once, distribute anywhere • Comprehensive documentation 19 th International Unicode Conference 3 San Jose, California, September 2001

Open Source • • Mature ICU more quickly Encourage Unicode adoption Promote use of IBM technologies Support other open source projects 19 th International Unicode Conference 4 San Jose, California, September 2001

GPL-Compatible Licensing • ICU 4 C 1. 8. 1 and later: X license (GPLCompatible) – http: //oss. software. ibm. com/developerworks/openso urce/cvs/~checkout~/icu/license. html • ICU 4 J 1. 3. 1 and later: X license – http: //oss. software. ibm. com/developerworks/openso urce/cvs/icu 4 j/~checkout~/icu 4 j/license. html • All prior ICU releases remain available under IPL (IBM Public License) 19 th International Unicode Conference 5 San Jose, California, September 2001

Unicode Standard Conformance Description ICU 4 C ICU 4 J Sun JDK Unicode 3. 0 character properties Normalization Process Language-sensitive sorting (UCA) Bidi algorithm SCSU compression 19 th International Unicode Conference 6 San Jose, California, September 2001

Common Features • Locale and resource management • Date/time support • Format and parse number, date/time and messages • Transliteration between various scripts 19 th International Unicode Conference 7 San Jose, California, September 2001

Other ICU 4 C Features • • Portable data interface Unicode string manipulations Character set conversion facilities Integrated tools for data delivery • Complex text layout engine 19 th International Unicode Conference 8 San Jose, California, September 2001

Other ICU 4 J Features • Complete Rule. Based. Break. Iterator support • Language-sensitive searching • International calendars, Hebrew/Islamic/Japanese/Buddhist/Chinese • Holiday framework • Styled text editing package 19 th International Unicode Conference 9 San Jose, California, September 2001

Collation Performance 19 th International Unicode Conference 10 San Jose, California, September 2001

Charset Conversion Performance 19 th International Unicode Conference 11 San Jose, California, September 2001

Common Architecture • Light-weight locale IDs • Code and data extensibility – Data-driven services, ease of customization – Shared constant data • Request and reuse model – Can use multiple locales in a single thread 19 th International Unicode Conference 12 San Jose, California, September 2001

ICU 4 C Architecture • • Versioning management Multi-thread support Cross-platform portability Preflighting and buffer overflow report 19 th International Unicode Conference 13 San Jose, California, September 2001

ICU 4 JNI • Access to ICU 4 C components from Java – Full charset conversion support – UCA compliant collation framework • Fast for bulk operations 19 th International Unicode Conference 14 San Jose, California, September 2001

ICU 2. 0 Features • Unicode 3. 1 character support – All 3. 1 normative properties – Supplementary character support throughout – Most support already in current releases • Extended transliteration • Common functionality in ICU 4 C and ICU 4 J 19 th International Unicode Conference 15 San Jose, California, September 2001

ICU Future Plans • • Performance and robustness enhancement Easy configurability Future Unicode standard updates New internationalization support 19 th International Unicode Conference 16 San Jose, California, September 2001

Development Process (1) • How to get ICU 4 C – http: //oss. software. ibm. com/icu/download – Source only, requires ANSI C++ compiler – Already ported to a wide variety of platforms • Windows, AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, Linux, S/390 • How to get ICU 4 J – http: //oss. software. ibm. com/icu 4 j/download – Source, and class files available in jar • How to get ICU 4 JNI – http: //oss. software. ibm. com/icu 4 jni/icu 4 jni. html 19 th International Unicode Conference 17 San Jose, California, September 2001

Development Process (2) • ICU mailing lists – http: //oss. software. ibm. com/icu/archives • Proposal and patch submission • Conflict resolution by PMC (project management committee) • CVS for source control, jitterbug for bugs – Will convert to use Source. Forge in the future 19 th International Unicode Conference 18 San Jose, California, September 2001

References • IBM ICU Open. Source Web Site: http: //oss. software. ibm. com/icu • IBM ICU 4 J Open. Source Web Site: http: //oss. software. ibm. com/icu 4 j • IBM Unicode Web Site: http: //www. ibm. com/developer/unicode/ • Unicode Standard Web Site: http: //www. unicode. org/ 19 th International Unicode Conference 19 San Jose, California, September 2001