Eclipse ResourceBundle Editor

I typically use the open-source Eclipse IDE for most of my Java and PHP work. For my corporate work, this means that I use IBM‘s packaged RAD and WSAD offerings that are based on various versions of the Eclipse framework.

When working on Internationalized (I18n) applications, most experienced Java architects rely on ResourceBundles to store the various text that is needed for different languages, problem is that editing these files becomes problematic, especially when dealing with multi-byte character sets as are often used in Unicode (non Latin-1, aka ISO-8859-1) languages.

The best editor I’ve found for this case is, as you may have guessed, free for download.

Here’s the links:

Cheers!

UTF-8 (BOM) prevents java compilation

I had an adventure tracking this one down lately, it seems that if your IDE saves files as UTF-8, the java compiler can’t always resolve the files.

Here’s the errors from the console output:

[INFO] ————————————————————————
[ERROR] BUILD FAILURE
[INFO] ————————————————————————
[INFO] Compilation failure

C:\Sandbox\Jars\example.jar\src\main\java\com\giantgeek\Example.java:[1,0] ‘class’ or ‘interface’ expected

C:\Sandbox\Jars\example.jar\src\main\java\com\giantgeek\Example.java:[1,1] illegal character: \187

C:\Sandbox\Jars\example.jar\src\main\java\com\giantgeek\Example.java:[1,2] illegal character: \191

Those character codes (\187 \191) may look a little familiar to some people, as they represent the Byte Order Mark (BOM) that prefixes a UTF-8 formatted file. If you look at them in a file editor (or text editor that doesn’t interpret UTF-8) they will look odd.

They look like “an i (two dots over), double right arrow, upside down question mark”.

Simple solution is to re-edit and save the file as ISO-8859-1.

An alternate approach that is available in some instances is to use the arguments to javac to allow the file encoding.

References:

Cheers!