In a blog post entitled, "Myth #6: Rails only speaks English," David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails, explains the addition to the Rails platform that makes it easier for developers to create applications for languages other than English.

"It used to be somewhat inconvenient to deal with UTF-8 [Unicode Transformation Framework] in Rails because Ruby's primary method of dealing with them was through regular expressions," Hansson said. "If you just did a naïve string operation, you'd often be surprised by results and think that Ruby was somehow fundamentally unable to deal with UTF-8."

Hansson said with Ruby on Rails 2.2, which was released on Nov. 21, internationalization will be easier with the Ruby-based Web framework. "Rails 2.2 ships with a simple internationalization framework that makes it silly-easy to do translations and locales," he said. "There's a dedicated discussion group, wiki and Web site for getting familiar with this work. I've been using it in a test with translating Basecamp to Danish and really like what I'm seeing ... Rails is very capable of making sites that need to be translated into many different locales. Before Rails 2.2, you'd have to use one of the many plug-ins. After Rails 2.2, you can use what's in the box for most cases (or add additional plug-ins for more exotic support)."

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