[jsword-devel] i18n and Actions

[DM Smith]

The EirAbstractActions derived classes all have hard coded strings. This 
makes internationalization a little bit of a chore as the "Java way" of 
getting international strings is via a ResourceBundle per class.

In an effort to do Internationalization and Localization (i18n and l10n) I 
used a pattern for actions that was in a tutorial on actions on the Sun web 
site and it served well.

The basic idea is this, Actions don't have behavior but just fire actions to 
listeners. The listeners have the behavior for the actions that they care 
about. To facilitate this an ActionManager singelton class is responsible 
for creating Actions and for listening to Actions. The ActionManager is 
responsible for forwarding ActionEvents to its ActionListeners. The 
ActionEvents are manipulated so they seem like they come from the button, 
menu item, check box or whatever that triggered the action event.

The advantage in the extra layer of the ActionManager, is that it is 
responsible for creating actions and supplying actions by simple names 
(createAction(...) and getAction(String simpleName). The action 
characteristics are held in a ActionManager.properties file that is part of 
the initialization of the singleton ActionManager, using ResourceBundle (or 
more likely an extended ResourceUtil) to get the proper localization of the 
action.

In the properties file each action would be of the form:
simpleName.LargeIcon=...
simpleName.SmallIcon=...
simpleName.MnemonicKey=...
Where the first element is the simple name (duh!!) and the second follows 
the spelling of the key used in Action.putValue.
The file can have as many actions as it likes and each will be built. It can 
have more than the applicatoin needs (i.e proceed it in development)

Listeners will distinguish Actions by simple name and act when one of 
interest appears.
The primary impact of this is that the actionPerformed of each action needs 
to be moved into the "actor" rather than actionPerformed being a delagate 
for that actor.

Let me know what you think and whether this would be a worthy change to 
make.

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