Internationalization and Java...

I just finished up internationalizing AppleCommander (I'm not working on anything else right now). This is great, but it's also really messy. Maybe AC is different, but I found i18n good for the following:

• Error messages in the user interface and domain;
• General customization of text used in the user interface;
• Choosing the appropriate date (or money) formats;
• I suspect it will be good for switching images that contain text - either by placing the filename in the properties file or by appending a language name at the end (ie, "de" for German).

The parts that really stink, and I'm not really clear if this is the standard or an Eclipse thing, is marking all the text that doesn't apply with a "// $NON-NLS-#$" marker. This seems to make a mess:

• Wherever text is pulled from the ResourceBundle;
• Keywords need to be commented - such as in the Basic formatters;
• Text formatting needs to be commented - as in the AppleWorks formatter;
• Assembly code generated from the compiler needs to be commented;
• I also just marked the test cases since I don't want or need to internationalize them (and, no, they're not really a good example of JUnit test cases).

Some of these areas had over 100 markers placed in the files. Thank goodness for the wizard!