XPD – where do you live?

Disclaimer: I’m trying to get some info from IBM on this subject so please check back as I will update this post as more info becomes available…

Again this is one of those posts that will annoy the heck out of European developers…

Internationalisation – or i18n – is done using the java.util.Locale class in Java. When calling Locale.getDefault() the standard Locale for the JVM should be returned and should be da_DK for me (country: Denmark, language: Danish), en_US for you US guys (country: USA, language: English) and de_AT for people from Austria (Country: Austria, language: German). The Locale can be supplied to many localisation sensitive classes such as java.util.Calendar etc. to make sure it works as expected for the current user locale. Most times however you don’t supply the locale explicitly which will make the platform do a Locale.getDefault() for the current locale.

Meet Lotus Notes 8+…

Per default Lotus Notes 8+ runs with a Locale of en_US which is great if you’re based in the USA and speak English or simply only use the built-in functionality of Lotus Notes. If you’re a plugin developer and you do any i18n work you will be sadly disappointed since Calendar and ResouceBundle will be broken. Since Locale.getDefault() returns en_US you will get back a Calendar for the US (e.g. Sunday is first day of the week) and English strings from your resource bundles.

Maybe this is why the preference has a page for locale setup (see File/Preferences/Calendar and To Do/Regional Settings) which is used by Mail.

To makes matters worse I think it’s a core platform issue since you can actually change the language of your Notes client by supplying a command line argument (-nl) to the Notes client. Doing this (-nl da / -nl da_DK) changes the menu item text in my Notes client but any plugin that use Locale.getDefault() still return an incorrect result as shown on the image below.

To make it even weirder it works as expected when the Notes client is started from the Eclipse IDE using “-nl da_DK”. Go figure!

(click on the image for larger version)

This behavior has been verified with Notes 8.0.1, Notes 8.0.2 and Notes 8.5 beta 2.