The JavaTM Tutorial

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Trail: JDK(TM) 1.1 -- And Beyond!
Lesson: What's New in 1.1?

## Internationalization

> One of the more comprehensive changes to the JDK provides support for programmers to easily write programs that are independent of the user's culture and language: We call these programs global programs. The process of writing a global program and ensuring that it can be used without change by anyone in the world is a process known as internationalization (often called "I18N" by those who don't care to type the full 20-letter word). Internationalization support is fully integrated into the classes and packages that provide language- or culture-dependent functionality. With internationalization completely built into the JDK, it becomes easy for programmers to write global applets and applications from the design phase forward.

> Features added to the JDK to support internationalization include the display of Unicode characters, a locale mechanism, localized message support, locale-sensitive date, time, time zone, and number handling, collation services, character set converters, parameter formatting, and support for finding boundaries of characters, words, and sentences.

### Where To Find Documentation

- The Internationalization trail documents these new features and shows you how to internationalize an existing program.

- In addition, you'll find the Internationalization Specification, some information about adding fonts to the Java runtime, and some demo applets in the JDK 1.1 `Internationalization` documentation area.

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