Programming for the Web in a distributed International environment To provide programming techniques and best practices for enabling Web developments to support an international environment with a focus on the Java/J2EE world.

This paper discusses a list of issues that developers encounter when creating true Global Web Applications that are able to run correctly independently of the user location and focuses on two aspects of the problem:

-Localization: make sure that the application content is easily localisable and the information presented to the user reflects his locales preferences for language, date, time and number formatting, etc...
-Multilingual data support: make sure that the data being sent by the server is in a format acceptable by the client and reciprocally that the data being sent by the client is interpreted, handled and stored correctly by the server.

Finally, this paper discusses different globalization strategies implemented in the IBM Websphere+AK4- product family and how Unicode is playing an important role:

-Websphere Application Server.
-Web Services and its associated open standards.
-Websphere Portal Server.