ReadMe for ICU4J

ReadMe: International Components for Unicode for Java

Version: 1.3.1 June 12 2001

Introduction
License Information
What the International Components for Unicode for Java Contains
API overview
Platform Dependencies
How to Install and Build
Where to Find More Information
Submitting Comments, Requesting Features and Reporting Bugs

Introduction

In today's global market, it is crucial to develop and maintain programs that support a wide variety of national languages. Customers prefer software and web pages in their own languages. Studies confirm that this leads to increased sales. Java provides a very strong foundation for global programs (IBM and the ICU4J team played a key role in providing such technology into Sun's standard Java version).

However, Java does not yet provide some features that are required in some products. The ICU4J library is an add-on to the regular JVM that provides the following tools:

Unicode Normalization – NFC, NFD, NFKD, NFKC
Produces canonical text representations, needed for XML and the net
International Calendars – Arabic, Buddhist, Hebrew, and Japanese
Required for correct presentation of dates in some countries.
Number Format Enhancements – Scientific Notation, Spelled-out, etc.
Enhances the normal Java number formatting. The spell-out format is used for checks and similar documents.
Enhanced word-break detection – Rule-based, supports Thai
Required for correct support of Thai.
Unicode Text Compression – Standard compression of Unicode text
Suitable for large numbers of small fields, where LZW and similar schemes do not apply

In some cases, the above support has been rolled into a later release of Java. For example, the Thai word-break is now in Java 1.4. However, if you are using Java 1.2, you can use the ICU4J package until you upgrade to 1.4.

License Information

The ICU projects (ICU4C and ICU4J) have changed their licenses from the IPL (IBM Public License) to the X license. The X license is a non-viral and recommended free software license that is compatible with the GNU GPL license. This is effective starting with release 1.8.1 of ICU4C and release 1.3.1 of ICU4J. All previous ICU releases will continue to utilize the IPL. New ICU releases will adopt the X license. The users of previous releases of ICU will need to accept the terms and conditions of the X license in order to adopt the new ICU releases.

The main effect of the change is to provide GPL compatibility. The X license is listed as GPL compatible, see the gnu page at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html#GPLCompatibleLicenses

The text of the X license is available at http://www.x.org/terms.htm. The IBM version contains the essential text of the license, omitting the X-specific trademarks and copyright notices.

For more details please see the press announcement and the Project FAQ.

What the International Components for Unicode for Java Contains

There are two ways to download the ICU4J releases,

Official Release Snapshot:
If you want to use ICU4J (as opposed to developing it), your best bet is to download an official, packaged ICU4J version of the ICU4J source code. These versions are tested more thoroughly than day-to-day development builds, and they are packaged in zip files for convenient download. These packaged files can be found at http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/download/index.html.
If packaged snapshot is named ICU4JXXXXXX.zip , XXXXXX is the release version number.
Please unzip this file. It will re-construct the source directory.

CVS Source Repository:
If you are interested in developing features, patches, or bug fixes for ICU4J, you should probably be working with the latest version of the ICU4J source code. You will need to check the code out of our CVS repository to ensure that you have the most recent version of all of the files. There are several ways to do this:
- WebCVS:
  If you want to browse the code and only make occasional downloads, you may want to use WebCVS. It provides a convenient, web-based interface for browsing and downloading the latest version of the ICU4J source code and documentation. You can also view each file's revision history, display the differences between individual revisions, determine which revisions were part of which official release, and so on.
- WinCVS:
  If you will be doing serious work on ICU4J, you should probably install a CVS client on your own machine so that you can do batch operations without going through the WebCVS interface. On Windows, we suggest the WinCVS client. The following is the example instruction on how to download ICU4J via WinCVS:
  1. Install the WinCVS client, which you can download from the http://www.wincvs.org.
  2. Select Preferences from the Admin menu.
    1. On the General tab panel: Set your CVSROOT to ":pserver:anoncvs@oss.software.ibm.com:/usr/cvs/icu4j".
      Leave other options on this page at their default.
    2. On the Ports tab panel: Check the pserver checkbox and enter port 2401.
  3. Click on the Login menu button (Admin menu). Enter in "anoncvs" when requested.
  4. To extract the most recent version of ICU4J, select Checkout module from the Create menu. Specify "icu4j" for the module name. This will create a new copy of the workspace on your local hard drive.
  5. In the future, you can download updated files from the repository to your hard drive using the Update selection item in the Modify menu.
- CVS command line:
  You can also check out the repository anonymously on UNIX using the following commands, after first setting your CVSROOT to point to the ICU4J repository:
```
export CVSROOT=:pserver:anoncvs@oss.software.ibm.com:/usr/cvs/icu4j 
cvs login CVS password: anoncvs 
cvs checkout icu4j 
cvs logout
```

For more details on how to download ICU4J directly from the web site, please also see http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j/download/index.html

Below, $Root is the placement of the icu directory in your file system, like "drive:\...\icu4j" in your environment. "drive:\..." stands for any drive and any directory on that drive that you chose to install icu4j into.

The following files describe the code drop:

readme.html (this file)	describes the International Components for Unicode for Java
license.html	contains the X license

The source directories mirror package structure of the code. The following directories contain source code and data files:

$Root/src/data/	Various data files used to generate ICU4J classes. Most of the files contain Unicode information that is available from http://www.unicode.org/. Used only by tools in the src/com/ibm/tools.
$Root/src/com/ibm/demo	Demonstration applications and Applets.
$Root/src/com/ibm/test	Tests for various ICU4J components.. For information about running the tests, see $Root/src/com/ibm/test/TestAll.java.
$Root/src/com/ibm/tools	Various tools used to generate ICU4J classes.
$Root/src/com/ibm/text	The following components: RuleBasedBreakIterator DictionaryBasedBreakIterator Transliterator Normalizer BigNumberFormat StringSearch Unicode compression
$Root/src/com/ibm/util	Calendars and Holidays
$Root/build	Additional classes needed to build using Ant

The following directories are populated when you've built everything:

$Root/classes/	contains all class files
$Root/doc	contains JavaDoc for all packages

Data organization:

Data is stored in various locations in ICU4J:

Data that is "raw" data goes into $Root/src/data. This includes things like the raw Unicode database. $Root/src/data does not contain .java source files.
Data that is in the form of a Java class, typically a ResourceBundle, but not necessarily, goes into one of the packages com.ibm.util.resources or com.ibm.text.resources, depending on whether the associated code lives in com.ibm.util or com.ibm.text.
Data that is not part of ICU4J proper (or its base tool set), but rather part of a test, sample, or demo, should go near the source code of its owner. This makes it easy to ship a core ICU4J release without optional components.

API Overview

The complete API documentation is available on the ICU4J web site:

Complete index
International Calendars – Islamic, Buddhist, Hebrew, Japanese
Unicode Normalization – Canonical text representation for W3C
Number Format Enhancements – Scientific Notation, Spelled-out, ...
Enhanced word-break detection – Rule-based, supports Thai
Unicode Text Searching – Efficient multi-lingual searching
Unicode Text Compression & Decompression – 2:1 compression on English Unicode text

Platform Dependencies

Parts of ICU4J depend on functionality that is only available in Java2 (JDk1.2) or later, although some components work under 1.1. However, all components should be compiled using a Java2 compiler as even components that run using a 1.1.x JVM may require language features that are only present in 1.2. Currently 1.1.x is unsupported and untested and you use the components on a 1.1.x system at your own risk.

How to Install and Build

To install ICU4J, simply place the prebuilt jar file icu4j.jar on your Java CLASSPATH. No other files are needed.

The prerequisites for building ICU4J are a working JDK and the Ant build system:

First install a recent JDK, at least version 1.2.
Next install the Ant build system, part of the Apache Software Foundation's Jakarta project. Ant is a portable, Java-based build system similar to make. ICU4J uses Ant because it introduces no other dependencies, it's portable, and it's easier to manage than a collection of makefiles. We currently build ICU4J using a single makefile on both Windows 9x and Linux using Ant.
Installing Ant is straightforward. Download it (see http://jakarta.apache.org/downloads/binindex.html), extract it onto your system, set some environment variables, and add its bin directory to your path. For example:
```
    set JAVA_HOME=C:\jdk1.2.2
    set ANT_HOME=C:\jakarta-ant
    set PATH=%PATH%;%ANT_HOME%\bin
    call antsetup
```
See the current Ant documentation for details.
It's recommended to install both the JDK and Ant somewhere outside the ICU4J directory, to keep them out of CVS's hair. For example, on Linux you might install these in /usr/local.

Once Ant is installed, building is just a matter of typing ant in the ICU4J root directory. This causes the Ant build system to perform a build as specified by the file build.xml, located in the ICU4J root directory. You can give Ant options like -verbose, and you can specify targets. Ant will only build what's been changed and will resolve dependencies properly.

F:\icu4j>ant tests
Buildfile: build.xml
Project base dir set to: F:\icu4j
Executing Target: core
Compiling 71 source files to F:\icu4j\classes
Executing Target: tests
Compiling 24 source files to F:\icu4j\classes
Completed in 19 seconds

Current targets that you can give after ant:

all	Build all targets.
core	Build the main class files in the subdirectory classes. If no target is specified, core is assumed.
tests	Build the test class files.
demos	Build the demos.
tools	Build the tools.
docs	Run javadoc over the main class files, generating an HTML documentation tree in the subdirectory doc.
jar	Create a jar archive icu4j.jar in the root ICU4J directory containing the main class files.
zip	Create a zip archive of the source, docs, and jar file for distribution, excluding unwanted things like CVS directories and emacs backup files. The zip file icu4jYYYYMMDD.zip will be created in the directory above the root ICU4J directory, where YYYYMMDD is today's date. Any existing file of that name will be overwritten.
zipsrc	Like the zip target, without the docs and the jar file. The zip file icu4jsrcYYYYMMDD.zip will be created in the directory above the root ICU4J directory.
clean	Remove all built targets, leaving the source.

For more information, read the Ant documentation and the build.xml file.

After doing a build it is a good idea to run all the tests by typing
"java -classpath $Root/classes -DUnicodeData=$Root/src/data/unicode com.ibm.test.TestAll".

(As an alternative to using Ant, you can build simply by running javac and javadoc directly. This is not recommended, but a Windows batch file "buildall.bat" exists to get you started if you're really allergic to build systems. You may have to create destination directories.)

Where to Find More Information

http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu4j is a pointer to general information about the International Components for Unicode in Java

http://www.ibm.com/developer/unicode is a pointer to information on how to make applications global.

Submitting Comments, Requesting Features and Reporting Bugs

Your comments are important to making this release successful. We are committed to fixing any bugs, and will also use your feedback to help plan future releases.

To submit comments, request features and report bugs, contact us through the ICU4J mailing list.
While we are not able to respond individually to each comment, we do review all comments.