This paper presents an approach to internationalizing a distributed Java application framework that supports multiple users in a global environment.

The JDK has locale-sensitive classes for internationalization and has one default locale. One locale was not enough for our global system management application framework. The framework has the following requirements:

• Needs to support multiple users simultaneously. User's locale and time zone can be different from the system default.
• Needs to support different locales for resource lookup and cultural conventions.
• Needs to allow user to override locale's default attributes.
• Needs to provide more features than the JDK, for example a multi-cultural calendar.

This paper describes these issues, and presents our approach to solving them.

The key aspects of our approach are the following:

• Encapsulate multiple locales and other internationalization attributes for a user in an International Preferences object.
• Create JDK and ICU4J wrappers to support the International Preferences object.
• Create a high-level framework service for applications. It manages International Preferences according to the application context.
• Enhance internationalization features by using IBM's International Components for Unicode for Java (ICU4J).

In conclusion, we show the benefits of this approach.

This approach benefits both framework application users and developers.

• For users, we provide flexible customization include multiple-locale support and consistent presentation throughout the framework applications.
• For application developers, we eliminate the need to worry about locales and other internationalization attributes when using our high-level service. The user's international preference is used automatically. Also, the low-level API is simplified by encapsulating various attributes in one international preferences object. The low-level API is designed to be reusable for other projects.