Call upon even better support for Unicode

Question

Hello
Following some messages I have posted regarding problems I encountered while developing a non-English web application, I would like to call upon an even better support for Unicode. Before I describe my call, I want to say that I consider Berkeley DBXML a superb product. Superb. It lets us develop very clean and maintainable applications. Maintainability is, in my view, the keyword in good software development practices.
In this message I would like to remind you that the US-ASCII 8-bit set of characters only represents 0.4% of all characters in the world. It is also true to say that most of our software comes from efforts of American developers, for which I am of course very grateful.
But problems with non US-ASCII characters are very very time consuming to solve. To start with, our operating systems need to be configured especially for unicode, our servers too, our development tools too, our source code too and, finally, our data too. That's a lot of configuring, isn't it? Believe me, as a Flemish french-speaking, danish-speaking developer who develops currently a new application in Portuguese, I know what I am talking about.
Have you ever tried to write a Java class called Ação.java, that loads an xml instance called Ação.xml that contains something like <?xml version="1.0" charset="utf-8"?></ação variável="descrição"/>? It takes at least the double of time to have all this work right in a web application on a Linux server than it would take to write a Acao.java that loads Acao.xml containing <?xml version="1.0" charset="us-ascii"?></acao variavel="descricao"/> (which is clearly something we do not want in Portugal).
I have experienced a problem while using the dbxml shell to load documents that have utf-8 encoded names. See difficulties retrieving documents with non ascii characters in name The work around is not to use the dbxml shell, with which I am of course not very happy.
So, while trying not to be arrogant and while trying to express my very very great appreciation for this great product, I call upon even better support for Unicode. After all, when the rest of us, that use another 65279 characters in our software, will be able to use this great product without problems, will it not contribute to the success of Berkeley DBXML?
Thank you
Koen
Edited by: koenheene on 29/Out/2009 3:09

Answer 1

Hello John and thank you for replying,
You are completely correct that it is a shell problem. I investigated and found solutions for running dbxml in a Linux shell. On Windows, as one could expect, no solution so far.
Here is an overview of my investigation, which I hope will be useful for other developers which also presist writing code and xml in their language.
difficulties retrieving documents with non ascii characters in name
I was wondering though if it would not be possible to write the dbxml shell in such a way that it becomes independent from the encoding of the shell. Surely their must be, not? Rewrite dbxml in Java? Any candidates :-) ?
Thanks again for the very good work,
Koen