PATTERNS OF DATA MODELING- P37: Models provide the means for building quality software in a predictable manner. Models let developers think deeply about software and cope with large size and complexity. Developers can think abstractly before becoming enmeshed in the details of writing code. Although models are beneficial, they can be difficult to construct. That is where patterns come in. Patterns provide building blocks that help developers construct models faster and better. | Chapter Summary 167 Chapter Summary A translation service is helpful when software must support multiple languages such as English French and Japanese. The need for such a capability often arises and can be delivered as a service apart from any particular application. This chapter presents several approaches to language translation. Bibliographic Notes Several commercial products have language translation capabilities including Multilizer Schaudin Lionbridge and Xataface. The terms internationalization and localization are prominent in the literature. Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization is the process of adapting software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text. Wikipedia The models in this chapter deal with internationalization. The population of data addresses localization. References Warmer-1999 Jos Warmer and Anneke Kleppe. The Object Constraint Language. Boston Addison- Wesley 1999. 13 Softcoded Values Most database applications directly map concepts to tables. The direct approach is effective for applications with well-defined entity types and attributes. However it fails for applications with open-ended requirements. Consider person data. Persons are prominent in applications and can involve much data. For example a police database could have a lengthy description of suspects including height weight eye color and hair color. The top of Figure shows a database table for Person using a direct representation hardcoding . The bottom shows an alternative representation using softcoding. The columns in boldface are primary keys. If the requirements are uncertain the hardcoding of person data will be fragile. New attributes will be likely to arise requiring model extensions and disrupting the application code. Softcoding decreases efficiency and increases storage .
