[news.eclipse.technology.babel] Re: Babel PTT

[kitlo@xxxxxxxxxx (Kit Lo)]

Víctor, let me try to answer your questions.

1. Externalize all Strings that are subject to be shown in the UI from our 
plugins (in our case, I expect only UI and Exceptions are subject to be 
shown). Use JDT and PDE tooling to externalize strings.

Answer: correct

2. Create a babel map. If I understand it correctly, this is kind of a 
file that exposes which externalized Strings can be translated by the 
Babel community. I saw this is done through a webapp. The first thing I 
see is our project does not appear, which I understand since we are not 
top level project under modeling, but rather under modeling.emf. How can 
we add our component to this list? Is there anything we should do?

Answer: We pull the information from a data bridge to Eclipse Bugzilla. If 
you don't see your project, please open a bug against Babel/Server.

4. Perform PTT to see everything is fine?

How is exactly the Pseudo Translation Test performed? I believe I should 
download the PTT plugin and then configure eclipse.ini to use it? Which is 
the flag I should use? If I understood correctly:

a. Hard-coded strings don't have prefix
b. Externalized Strings have prefix. If the string has the prefix, what 
does it exactly mean?

Question: where is the index file that maps prefix to file containing the 
string?

Answer: There are 2 ways to get the pseudo translation language packs, 
either through the Babel update site, or the downlable zips. See 
http://www.eclipse.org/babel/downloads.php for more info. After installing 
the language packs, start Eclipse with -nl en_AA. After that, just run 
your project normally. You will see most of the strings with a special 
prefix like "eclipse123456:". If a string does not have a prefix, it 
usually means the string is hard-coded in the code. The added length of 
the prefix will help you test truncation problems. For example, if a 
button is not coded correctly, the new label "eclipse123456:OK" will be 
truncated. The prefix can also tell you which project does the string come 
from. The index number can be used to locate the exact key in the 
properties that it's coming from. The index file can be found in the 
pesudo translation feature for the project. This is the path for the 
Eclipse index file for example: 
eclipse\features\org.eclipse.babel.nls_eclipse_en_AA_3.5.0.v20090406043401\BabelPseudoTranslationsIndex-eclipse.html