I’d like to take Eduardo‘s call to action one step further in terms of welcoming the non-English speaking international community to java.net. Java.net is a site with the potential to become the central train station for all things Java. As a community, we should be able to welcome all users and developers, regardless of their language.

While I haven’t seen the source code for the java.net site, hopefully it is taking advantage of JSP best practices and not hard-coding English strings into the pages. Using standard J2SE ResourceBundle, we should be able to use and take advantage of formatting actions in the JSTL so that all displayed text comes from specific resource bundles. If in fact the JSTL is currently being used on the site, we should be able to create a new java.net project so that various ResourceBundle files are open-sourced that can then be translated by members of the community (as Eduardo suggested). Not only will this encourage participation from community members around the world, but we’d have a site that showcases some of the latest Java web development technologies.

I fully understand that this is an incredibly dynamic site (information-wise), but dynamic content is what it’s all about. If we can’t accommodate the requirements of handling dynamic content in multiple languages, then how can we expect other Java developers to? If there are members of the java.net web development team reading this, maybe you can add some comments if something similar to this approach is in the works?