E-business globalization solution design guide : getting started

Summary: The Internet transcends national boundaries and geographical barriers. Many e-business entities have sought help from IBM in extending their e-business worldwide. IBM's own marketing messages have stressed the global aspect of e-business, and our customers therefore expect IBM to be able to provide the solutions. Take a simple e-commerce application, for example. A company wants to set up a Web site to sell to customers from all over the world. Studies also have shown that users are much more likely to purchase from a Web site in their own language. With the worldwide growth of e-business, globalization is not only an add-on value but a must for global e-business applications. In fact, globalization has become an architecture in the realm of e-business. The key to globalization architecture is the Single Executable, which is the proper design and execution of systems, software, services, and procedures so that one instance of software, executing on a single server or end-user machine, can process multilingual data and present culturally correct information (for example, collation, date, and number formats). This IBM Redbooks publication presents a globalization architecture, a working example, and an accompanying set of methodologies. It explains from the customer's point of view how to plan and then design a multilingual solution with the IBM-recommended globalization application architecture, how it works throughout the application development cycle, and how the working example validates the soundness of this architecture.