Write? Rewrite? Use? - Thoughts on shaky frameworks

Java is a great language. A great framework, tool, environment, libraries, all of that. From the very beginning the designers of Java thought of almost anything. Well, almost. ResourceBundle didn't support UTF-8 till Java 6! A few bugs were opened on that during the years (4093632 from 1997, 4221013 nicely written, 4749531 begging, 4919638 and 6204853 giving a final attempt, probably missing some). But it took a long time for someone to listen.

Were they drunk those guys? localization with support only for ISO-8859-1? are you nuts?

Yes, you could use escaped unicode (like '\uXXXX'), but it's not readable. Yes, you could use a UTF-8 file and escape your unicode as part of your build process (native2ascii). Some IDEs (netbeans) volunteered to do this automatically for you. But this is still bad.

Luckily for us, in Java 6 you can construct a PropertyResourceBundle with a Reader, thus you can create a Reader based on UTF-8. Or maybe not so luckily? The ResourceBundle.getBundle still works the old way, you cannot ask it to use UTF-8, so they hacked only half way - what the point? (Yes, you can use the Java 6 ResourceBundle.Control class to control the creation of your bundles but it's so lame. I implemented it and it works, but amount of code needed for such a simple task is unreasonable).

Here comes the question: should we use this problematic framework or write our own implementation? After all, it's not rocket science.

Usually I tend to be very careful with suggesting "write your own version of it". Our development instinct is usually seeing the flaws in some existing implementation, convincing our boss that we must write our own new version of it. In many cases our new version misses some important parts that the preexisting implementation already handled. In some cases the drawbacks that we saw in the preexisting code are in fact design decisions required in order to deal with scenarios that we don't think of or ignore and may tackle us later. So when I do see some existing commonly used library I'm very careful before I decide it's not good for me.

I found this suggested implementation. Seem much easier than the way to do that with the bone thrown at us with Java 6.

Still, might be not so bad idea to implement the entire thing, load of resource bundle, by myself. I still hesitate.