IBM alphaWorks has announced the release of Global Business Object. Global Business Object (GBO) is a technical preview that provides a set of libraries for constructing culturally-aware graphical controls. GBO encapsulates the functions into a reusable globalization tag library in a J2EE environment. Programmers can easily create global GUI functions in Java Server Pages (JSP) files by simply using GBO's tags.

In the case of the input fields for name and address, GBO's tags can render a name or an address entered into an HTML form whose fields, labels, and order conform to the user's cultural expectations. In the case of the calendar, GBO's tags can display a pop-up calendar window whose first day and weekend adhere to the cultural convention of the user. In addition, GBO allows programmers, within limits, to customize the display of the graphical controls to match the UI style of an entire page.

Currently, GBO includes five globalization features: Name, Address, Pop-up Calendar, Date Chooser, and Time Chooser. It can support 24 languages and their corresponding locales. The languages are English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Italian, Spanish, Brazil Portuguese, Arabic, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Norwegian, Polish, Portugal Portuguese, Russian, Swedish, and Turkish.

This version of GBO tag library is an extension of the Java Server Faces (JSF) tag library for providing culture-sensitive GUI controls for JSF applications. Since the whole library is componentized by globalization feature and language, programmers can configure and build a sub-package by selecting the necessary features and languages for their applications.

To read more visit http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/tech/gbo?open&S_TACT=105AGX59&S_CMP=GR&ca=dgr-jw26awgbo