MessageFormat v2 Tech Preview

[Mihai Nita]

Hello everybody,

Here is something that is not related to the Okapi Framework (yet), but it is coming, will be in Okapi at some point, and it is relevant for both i18n and l10n.

ICU4J 72.1 was released not long ago, and contains a Tech Preview of a new version of MessageFormat.
There is already a public blog entry, so I will not go into details, only give you the links. And a call to action 🙂

The blog entry: https://blog.unicode.org/2022/10/messageformat-2-technical-preview.html

This is the javadoc for the package: https://unicode-org.github.io/icu-docs/apidoc/released/icu4j/index.html?com/ibm/icu/message2/package-summary.html

If you want to see what it looks like when using it, or have some code to start from in your experiment, probably the unit tests are a good place: https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/tree/main/icu4j/main/tests/core/src/com/ibm/icu/dev/test/message2

The (not final) spec is here: https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/blob/main/spec/syntax.md

Call to action

So, please-please take it for a spin!

The project site is here: https://github.com/unicode-org/message-format-wg/, and that is where you can file bugs against the spec of the implementation, ask for features, and in general provide any kind of feedback.

If you think it would be useful (maybe after you play with it a bit) we can also schedule a meeting where I can help, answer questions, discuss what this means for Okapi, etc.

Although the best avenue is probably the project page. That is more visible, and an official issue filed is better than me playing intermediary :-)