Ian Landsman is Starting From Scratch, August 25, 2006:
Philipp’s New Product
If you're in the market for a powerful and user friendly Help Desk solution, please take a look at my company's flagship product HelpSpot.
Philipp is looking at creating a new product for localizing .NET based software. I don’t know much about that industry in the .NET world, but I can tell you right now that I’d happily pay $1000+ for a PHP solution that was seamless and worked well in a standard PHP system (aka I don’t want to jump through special hoops because it’s PHP). There’s pretty much nothing for this in the PHP world, at least not that’s professional grade and seamless.
If I had decent tools for this I’m sure HS would already be in 3-4 languages. While I’m ranting, if anyone knows of good tools for this please post a link.
Discussion
Nobody's going to invest in making software like this that you could buy for $1000. Unlike the .NET world, the PHP community isn't used to paying for libraries or components. Someone would just make an open source knockoff and give it away.
Created by lee on 08.25.2006 10:37 pm
Have you ever looked at Textpattern? It's a CMS that's used (and developed) by a bit more of an international community. It's got a novel approach to the localization issue. You should check it out.
Created by Walker Hamilton on 08.26.2006 12:10 pm
Ian, I don't understand what you're looking for... I18N is not about available "products", it's about good design of your application. I've been designing my PHP-based sites and applications for years to support multiple languages, regardless if the content is static, stored in a file or loaded from database...
Created by Berislav Lopac on 08.27.2006 6:40 pm
Well I would pay for it Lee because I want support and almost all OS knockoffs pale in comparison to their original counterparts.
I'll take a look at Textpattern, thanks Walker.
Berislav, I mean more than just how the variables are stored. I'm talking about software that helps with the entire process like working with the translators and so on. The actual code is only a small part of the full takes that internationalization is.
Created by Ian on 08.27.2006 9:09 pm
I see now what you mean. I can envision a small CRUD application that would give the translators a simple and effective interface to your language database; it could then offer a number of ways to export the database to be used in an application (PHP include file, XML document, SQL dump etc).
Is that what you had in mind? And do you have any ideas what the translators' workflow would be?
Created by Berislav Lopac on 08.28.2006 3:29 am
Yes that's what I'm talking about. I especially like the idea of having multiple options for using the translated data.
I have no idea what the workflow would be. I haven't given it lots of thought and actually the reason I'd like to buy a quality product is so I don't have to 
Perhaps this is something you should give some more thought to. Sounds like you're interested in this stuff. I do think there's a market especially if you work "with" the open source community. For instance letting open source web applications use the system for free to translate their apps.
Created by Ian on 08.28.2006 8:28 am
AHILLL (Ah, how I love Link Love)!
I will aim to eventually build a product where the workflow support and actual translation tools are shared across a variety of "target formats", including generic databases and XML formats. In true Micro-ISV style, however, I will first and foremost concentrate on the .NET "niche" before expanding.
There are numerous ideas I already have in mind (and have exchanged good ideas with a few individuals, too) --- I will very soon walk the talk and blog about all this. There is a season for everything, and this one is just about to materialize. I got a few take-aways from this discussion here, too. Good stuff as usual. Yours is one of my Micro-ISV blog highlights. (I have linked to other such highlights in my Online Reading list.)
Created by Philipp Schumann on 08.29.2006 10:24 pm
Thanks Philipp. Definitely keep us in the loop on what you're up to.
I think staying focused is the right thing to do and .NET is certainly a better initial market to aim for, but I'm sure there's money in the PHP space for components if anyone would just try it
Created by Ian on 08.29.2006 11:21 pm
Definitely---however, there is no built-in technological component such as embedded resource files (for which "just" better editing and workflow tools are needed), rather people will deal with custom, practical solutions such as XML files, text files or tables in their site's existing database. What I'm getting it is that any tool providing better support for localizing such stuff (including mine eventually) would probably not be described by their producers or customers as a "PHP", a "Perl", a "Ruby" or an "ASP" localization tool, and nonetheless could be utilized. (I may take the hint and customize the marketing ages from now when I have reached that stage.) So if you would even be willing to spend 1K, look into some of the existing tools, based on my limited research they do claim to support that kind of custom infrastructure to some extent. VisLoc is one of the tools in that space I noticed that could well provide just what you need. Of course I'd rather have you waiting for my product but I try to keep my expectations realistic. 
Created by Philipp Schumann on 08.29.2006 11:30 pm
Actually VisLoc doesn't really meet my needs because I want native PHP integration. Parsing XML is a lot of overhead and doing it on every request just gets silly (IMHO) also not all PHP installations have XML support and so on.
I want something which creates PHP variables that can be included and has options like breaking up the includes to multiple files,etc.
Of course I could probably convert the generic XML to PHP before shipping HelpSpot releases but that just seems like a pain in the butt and I'm sure to run into all types of issues. That's again why I want a professional product that does it all in a supported and well thought out way (which I don't want to think of)
Created by Ian on 08.30.2006 12:06 am
I've used Catalyst, and don't believe there is any competition for this product even though it does not work very well. The pro version costs over $10,000 USD/license. Basically it extracts all your english resources from a program into proprietary file. Translators can then open up the file and change all the English to the desired language. Catalyst is then used to build language specific satallite assemblies which are loaded dynamically by your .Net program depending on the culture its running on.
The result is far from perfect, though. There are a host of little defects you have to deal with such as manually resizing dialogs to make buttons re-appear.
The ridiculous price and poor functionality point to lack of competition in the localization software market.
http://www.alchemysoftware.ie/products/order_catalyst.html
Created by Parviz on 08.31.2006 10:14 pm
Parviz, thanks! Just the kind of information I'm currently longing for...
Created by Philipp Schumann on 09.01.2006 1:07 pm