Suppose, for example, your London-based firm has developed a proprietary application for Palm devices that has increased employee productivity across the board. Everything is hunky-dory until the day comes when your company expands and opens a branch in Tokyo. Your new Japanese employees are all equipped with Palm devices, but your proprietary software is useless, since it's completely designed in English.

In this global business environment, it's vital to keep in mind that the Palm OS-based application you create in one country may need to be used throughout the world. Special attention must therefore be given in the programming phase to the particular characters, strings, numbers, and dates that are used, as different countries represent these items in different ways.

To understand more about programming these so-called "localized applications," I did some research on Palm's Web site. I found a page devoted to the subject, and I'd like to share some of what I've learned. While this article may be of primary use to developers, it's a valuable read for anyone working in a company that's trying to integrate Palm computing into his or her international business.

This article is intended only as an introduction to localized applications. For the full details, be sure to visit http://oasis.palm.com/dev/kb/manuals/1747.cfm.

Terminology
In this discussion, there's going to be a lot of talk of "strings." In computer science, a string is a set of consecutive characters that a computer treats as a single item, like a word or a phrase.

Characters in an alphabet are represented by computers using a numeric code. A "character encoding" is the set of numeric codes for a given alphabet, which includes all the letters of that alphabet, punctuation, numbers, control characters, etc. A "character set" is the entire set of characters a particular character encoding represents.

The Palm operating system can support multiple character encodings, but any given Palm OS device supports only one language, and thus only one character encoding.