Quick Questions for Andrey “A.I.” Sitnik

RubyLearning caught up with Andrey “A.I.” Sitnik developer of R18n, a tool to internationalize and localize your Merb/Sinatra/desktop Ruby application, and asked him some quick questions in this interview.

Satish Talim>> Andrey, could you tell us something about yourself – your background, where you are based?

Andrey>> I live in Saint Petersburg, Russia and study in Saint Petersburg State Polytechnical University.

I believe in the ubiquity of genetic algorithms and that diversity (of culture, languages, etc) is necessary for progress.

Satish>> What is “R18n” ?

Andrey>> This is the only normal name that isn’t taken by any other Rails plugins

Satish>> What was the idea behind “R18n” ?

Andrey>> I18n logic is the same for any application and doesn’t depend on a framework. So, I think, that i18n library must be agnostic with core gem and gems for “out of box” work with additional frameworks.

Satish>> How does your tool help to internationalize and localize a Merb / Sinatra app?

Andrey>> R18n helps to translate interface and print dates and numbers in user traditions (for example, “27.04.2009″ in Russian and “04/27/2009″ in USA). To translate your data (e.g. in database) you need to write you own logic, because it’s very business specific.

Satish>> For a Ruby beginner, can you illustrate the usage of your tool with an example ?

Andrey>> Add R18n to your Sinatra application:
require 'sinatra/r18n'

Now your app has i18n support and you need to add translations file in i18n/ dir. For example ./i18n/en.yml:
post:
friends: Post only for friends
tags: Post tags: %1

comments: !!pl
0: No comments
1: One comment
n: %1 comments

And use these translated messages in a view:
i18n.post.friends
i18n.post.tags(@post.tags.join(', '))
i18n.comments(@post.comments.size)

Also it would be good if a user reads numbers and dates in his culture formats:
i18n.l @post.created_at, :date
i18n.l 10000

Satish>> Are you working on any other Ruby based project?

Andrey>> I am working on my science project related to machine learning via genetics algorithms using Ruby and plan to start a genetic algorithms Ruby library.

Satish>> What will be there in the next version of “R18n” ?

Andrey>> I plan a performance optimization (compile translation files?) and a Rails plugin with compatibility with Rails I18n API.

Thank you Andrey. In case you have any queries and/or questions, kindly post your questions here (as comments to this blog post) and Andrey would be glad to answer.