Java.Net for non-English speakers - a Call for Action...

I was born in Spain (in Barcelona, Catalunya), and grew up in Venezuela where I went to college. I moved to the San Francisco Bay Area for my graduate work and eventually came to work in the Java platform group at Sun Microsystems. Now I'm used to being at the center of the Java universe, and for many of my interactions I either walk down the hall, pick up the phone, or have a quick email exchange (too much of that, but that is a different topic!). Living here it is easy to forget that for some people it may be very hard to find information about Java, specially informal information, and specially if you are not very comfortable in English. And that it can be hard to find a developer community.

Yesterday I was at the java.net BOF that JBob put together. JBob says that the oversea response to java.net is extraordinary. To me that makes a lot of sense: I believe that java.net will help all Java developers, overseas or not, to be better connected to each other. Some of that connection will be in English but not everybody is fluent in this language, and I want to encourage us to remember the needs of those developers. We can do this in a number of ways: by using the community to localize documentation, by creating forums around specific languages and by writing localizable applications. It will take a while, but let's get moving.

As an experiment in this direction, and carrying the hat of manager for the Web Services and XML community, I've created two forums in there: one is intended for conversations in Spanish, I will participate there (although I'm going to take a post-J1 break starting Monday); the other is for conversations in Japanese, I hope Kohsuke Kawaguchi will participate there. If you are fluent in the WS & XML community and are fluent in the language drop by and give us a hand. Let's see how it goes; we will report back.

Muchas gracias,

- Eduardo Pelegrí Llopart / Eduard Pelegrí i Llopart