Bio

I have been a web developer for 10 years using open source technologies. I am currently the CTO for a China-based start-up e-travel company. We use exclusively open source software and have overcome big challenges in using open source tools to handle a multi-lingual system covering many languages and character encoding sets. We have had to deal with database storage, rendering, PDF and fax generation in an entirely multi-lingual fashion using only open source tools.

Challenges for multi-lingual systems with OSS tools

A broad discussion of the unique challenges posed by creating multi-lingual systems which utilise different character sets and font encodings, and the state of OSS tools available to address them.

• Outline issues with multi-lingual, multi-character-set systems
• Describe OSS tools and their features and shortcomings for handling this
• Specific coverage of telephony (asterisk), fax (hylafax) and
  pdf (fpdf) tools.
• Present the dajiudian wang system I built in China as a case study for building a complex multi lingual system with 100% OSS
• Make a case for multi-lingual architecture in OSS given the tools are now there and argue against mono-lingual systems architecture based on the experience of the dajiudian wang project.