ICU - International Components for Unicode

What is ICU?

ICU stands for International Components for Unicode.

ICU is a cross-platform Unicode based globalization library. It includes support for locale-sensitive string comparison, date/time/number/currency/message formatting, text boundary detection, character set conversion and so on.

History

ICU was originally developed by the Taligent company. The Taligent team later became the Unicode group at the IBM® Globalization Center of Competency in Cupertino.

Developing globalized software is a continuous balancing act as software developers and project managers inadvertently underestimate the level of effort and detail required to create foreign-language software releases.In general, the standard process for creating globalized software includes "internationalization," which covers generic coding and design issues, and "localization," which involves translating and customizing a product for a specific market.

ICU Services provides standard platform-independent libraries to resolve this issue.

The ICU services support all major locales with language and sub-language pairs.

Services of ICU

ICU enables you to write language-independent C and C++ code that is used on separate, localized resources to get language-specific results. ICU supports many features, including language-sensitive text, dates, time, numbers, currency, message sorting, and searching. ICU provides language-specific results for a broad range of languages.

The set of services provided by ICU includes:

Strings, Properties and CharacterIterator
Conversion Basics
Locale and Resource Management Support
Date and Time Support
Format and Parse
Formatting Numbers
Transformations
Searching and Sorting
Text Analysis
Text Layout
Search String


ICU and Java

Java™ classes developed at Taligent were incorporated into the Java Development Kit (JDK) 1.1 developed by Sun® Microsystems. The classes were then ported to C++ and later some classes were also ported to C. The classes provide internationalization utilities for writing global applications in C, C++, or Java programming languages.

ICU for Java (ICU4J) includes enhanced versions of some of these classes, plus additional classes that complement the classes in the JDK. C and C++ versions of the same international functionality are available in ICU for C (ICU4C). The APIs differ slightly due to language differences and new functionality.

For example, ICU4C includes a character converter API.ICU4J and ICU4C keep the same development goals. They both track additions to the Java internationalization APIs and implement the latest released Unicode standard. They also maintain a single, portable source code base.

Reference

http://icu-project.org/