User Guide

Table Of Contents
403
CHAPTER 17
Developing Globalized Applications
Macromedia ColdFusion MX lets you develop dynamic applications for the Internet. Many
ColdFusion applications are accessed by users from different countries and geographical areas.
One design detail that you must consider is the globalization of your application so that you can
best serve customers in different areas.
This chapter contains information that you can use to develop applications that can be accessible
to many different users.
Contents
Introduction to globalization . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 403
About character encodings . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 406
Locales. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 408
Processing a request in ColdFusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 410
Tags and functions for globalizing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
Handling data in ColdFusion MX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 416
Introduction to globalization
Globalization lets you create applications for all of your customers in all the languages that you
support. In some cases, globalization can let you accept data input using a different character set
than the one you used to implement your application. For example, you can create a website in
English that lets customers submit form data in Japanese. Or, you can allow a request URL to
contain parameter values entered in Korean.
Your application also can process data containing numeric values, dates, currencies, and times.
Each of these types of data can be formatted differently for different countries and regions.
You can also develop applications in languages other than English. For example, you can develop
your application in Japanese so that the default character encoding is Shift-JIS, your ColdFusion
pages contain Japanese characters, and your interface displays in Japanese.