Treffer: Automating Localization.

The article offers a tip in automating localization. The localization would be mainly text processing so I needed some kind of scripting language with good support for regular expressions (RE). Python and Perl would be an obvious choice but I was more familiar with Java so I started with that. I used the Apache Regexp package and tried a simple test. It was an artificial intelligence problem like spam filtering. A person can easily recognize text strings just by looking at the HTML code and I wanted a program to approximate that intuitive filtering process. RE form their own language, one that is very useful but hard to read and document. The localizer filter made two kinds of mistakes: It might grab some code as a text string, a false positive, or it might ignore a testing string as code, a false negative. False positives are easier to clean up than false negatives. The user removing a key from the language table rather than inventing a new key and inserting it into the language table in the right place. In the test-driven development approach, the user maintain a test suite together with the application. To add some functionality, the user add a test, check that the test fails with the current code and only then add some code to make the test pass.