Hi Mario, As a remainder I have made in 2004 a comparison between ICU and java.text. I cannot find why I have at the time rejected a ICU binding (except it is a huge machinery for so little classes and that RuleBasedCollator must have a severe layer to adapt the rules to ICU's format). Here is the reference: http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2004-03/msg00283.html and http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/classpath/2004-03/msg00204.html Cheers, Guilhem. Mario Torre wrote: > Hi! > > We have discussed on IRC about making ICU4J [1] our default > implementation of the java.text package. > > The ICU4J api contains few classes that are almost a one-to-one > replacement of the java.text API, as well as some classes that are > needed for correct operation. > > The library is copyright by IBM and is licensed under the X license, so > I guess there will be no problem using it for Classpath, I would like to > have other opinions here. > > I had the opportunity to read about this library and if I have > understood well everything, even Sun JDK uses it for the main > implementation of java.text, this will close the gap in functionality > for this package, and makes us a little ahead if we want to integrate > the two environment at some point (how I like to write this! Still I > can't believe it happened!!) > > Not everything is easy as it seems, though; for example, the Collator > stuff does not support full decomposition, and this will have to be > implemented. > > I don't know the internals yet, so I cannot be sure of all the > implications, but I guess that we could add some of our old > implementation to the class to integrate it. > > With Mark, I've discussed about some possible ways to integrate this > stuff. > > The one that seems to be most useful is to add the library as is into > the /external directory of Classpath then write wrapper classes in the > java.text package. > > This way we don't have to change code inside ICU4J, and we can also take > our old implementation at hand. > > I'm open to suggestions, here. In the meantime, I'm working on the > DecimalFormat class, as this is the one that takes less work (and I know > it well, as I've spent the last two months on this :). > > Thanks, > Mario > > [1] http://icu.sourceforge.net/
