Presently none of the established and well-respected client-server architectures like CORBA, Java" 2 Enterprise Edition (J2EE), or Microsoft" DCOM provide any infrastructure for distributed internationalization. All of them tacitly assume that in multi-lingual environments, a server may freely impose its own locale and time zone on all the locale- and time zone-sensitive computation requests from clients.

The Internationalization Service, a potentially new CORBA Common Object Service, provides a sound, robust, and flexible architectural infrastructure for properly localizing heterogeneous client-server applications distributed over IIOP. The internationalization service makes the 'internationalization context' available to the business methods. The internationalization context consists of the locale and time zone information under which a business method should execute. The internationalization service transparently creates, and propagates the internationalization context during business method invocations. No extra parameters are needed in the method interfaces for accessing the internationalization contexts. With minimal extra programming effort in the form of a Java Naming and Directory Interface" (JNDI) lookup, a business method can obtain the locale and time zone information from the internationalization context using the APIs provided by internationalization service. The locale and time zone can be used to properly localize relevant computations in distributed environments.

The present paper discusses the principal technical considerations behind the development of localized distributed client-server applications. The design of internationalization service is discussed in detail. The use of the internationalization service in IBM WebSphere® for developing internationalized J2EE applications is illustrated by appropriate examples. The ongoing and future internationalization work in client-server environments is also highlighted.