They really do suck at marketing OpenSolaris. I don’t know how much they want to be in the Ubuntu / Fedora space. OpenSolaris has live disk ( finally ), so you can try it out.

    I spent a lot of time last week trying to get my application up and running. I did not spend time debugging or anything productive like that. I spent most of the time doing other things waiting for downloads.

    So, here is my first reason. The line between OpenSolaris and Sun seems to be as distinct as mud. You are bouncing back and forth between the two sites. One site for this, one sie for that.

    The second reason is the Sun Java Downloader is just evil. I never could get a complete download. My favorite error message was that I had completed too many successful downloads and would not let me download anymore. I guess for Sun, successful is zero. I finally downloaded the Indiana Developers Preview using bittorrent which is light years ahead of that Java thing.

    Finally , what is happening with Sun studio ? I download a copy of OpenSolaris and I have to go to Sun to get Sun Studio? Can’t you just admit that gcc is a good compiler and included it on the live CD.

    All that said, I really do wish to get my stuff running on OpenSolaris. Then again, I was really frustrated with Fedora a few years back. Redhat turned that around, and I think Sun will also.

    I added a link to Lawrence Scott’s blog. Not much there now, but I think he will start writing more.

    Well, support for the GUI anyway. Command line stuff is still going to be command line stuff. For that you want it to be english. ( Have you ever tried Chinese on the command line ? )

    I am supporting French and Traditional Chinese first, because those are two of the languages that I can read/write. ( Besides English of course. )

    I originally tried using .po files for translation. That was OK, but not great. It is the supported method for wxWidgets, but that does not mean it is a great method. .po files are based on gettext, and gettext is “sub optimal”. Feel free to translate “sub optimal” as ’sucks’.

    So today, I went with a dynamic translation engine. The translations are defined at runtime using a C++ class. What is special about defining translations at runtime ?

               Plugins.

    When you define plugins, without a run time engine, you cannot add translations without editing the translation file for the entire app. So here is an example, say you write a plugin to pull the 13 week range on an equity. In chinese (HK) , that would be 13週波幅. How many people would want to edit a .po file that would get overwritten by the next update of the software? No one of course.

    By moving the plugin translations to the plugin definition file, we can get UTF8 translations that will not get overwritten by new updates. Coolness.