Globalize your On Demand Business

As computing environments become more heterogeneous, software portability becomes more important. ICU is a cross-platform Unicode enablement API. It includes Unicode-compliant support for locale-sensitive string comparison, date/time/number/currency/message formatting, text boundary detection, and character set conversion. ICU lets you produce the same results across all platforms you support, without sacrificing performance. It offers great flexibility to extend and customize the supplied services, which include:

• Text: Unicode text handling, full character properties and character set conversions (500+ codepages)
• Analysis: Unicode regular expressions; full Unicode sets; character, word and line boundaries
• Comparison: Language sensitive collation and searching
• Transformations: normalization, upper/lowercase, script transliterations (50+ pairs)
• Locales: Comprehensive locale data (230+) and resource bundle architecture
• Complex Text Layout: Arabic, Hebrew, Indic and Thai
• Time: Multi-calendar and time zone
• Formatting and Parsing: dates, times, numbers, currencies, messages and rule based

ICU is an open source development project sponsored, supported, and used by IBM. It is dedicated to providing robust, full-featured, commercial quality, freely available Unicode-based technologies. The ICU project is licensed under the X License (see also the x.org original), which is compatible with GPL but non-viral (see License Announcement). The ICU library supports multi-threading environments, and is available in C, C++ and Java (for the latter see ICU for Java).

Summary
Freely available open standards based Unicode solutions like ICU help preserve diverse cultures and languages. It is the best practice for software development where developers and users world-wide can take advantage of software globalization.