Recipient Institution:
Sun Wah Hi Tech (Nanjing) System Software Limited

Room D&E, 8/F Fusheng Building
1 Fuhougang, Nanjing 210008
People's Republic of China

Tel/Fax: 86-25-369 6091
Email: zqwang@sw-linux.com

Sun Wah Linux Limited

12/F, 9 Des Voeux Road West
Sheung Wan
Hong Kong

Tel/Fax: 85-22-2500230
Email: roger.so@sw-linux.com

Free Standards Group - Open Internationalization Workgroup

404 Wyman Street
Waltham, MA.02454
United States of America

Tel/Fax: 1-781-237-3442
Email: hshih@openi18n.org

Project Leader:
Roger So

Amount and Duration: US$ 30,000 / 12 months

Commencement Date:
1 January 2004

Abstract of Project
Many open-source development projects are widely used and contributed to by people from all over the world. However, most of the projects were originally designed with only Latin-language speaking people in mind and have typically not yet been appropriately internationalized for users of other languages. The majority of the users in rural areas of the world cannot always afford to upgrade to newer versions of a graphical user interface time and time again to obtain correct national language support. Therefore, it is important to provide a way to level the field so these users can access information in their local languages by leveraging utilities that are freely available.

iTerm is a project that will facilitate this becoming a reality. iTerm stands for internationalized terminal; it is a platform independent framework for making an internationalized virtual terminal emulator. One will be able to easily build internationalized virtual terminals/widgets on various platforms by implementing only the platform dependent part of this proposed framework. The intent of this project is to provide a design based on the Model-View-Controller(MVC)(i) architecture. The MVC model -- where Controller relates to Input, Model relates to the Processing method(s), and View relates to Output -- provides portability and consistency among terminal emulators, including frame-buffer based consoles. The foundation of the iTerm will implement a "view" independent terminal emulator capability and include pluggable engine support for bidirectional languages, such as Hebrew and Arabic.