The Palm webOS platform was designed from the beginning to be a world-ready system, from the choice of OS technologies through the UI design. While it may take some time to support all languages and regions, and to provide the application content to meet the needs of users in all locales, the framework has the basic support you need to build global applications.

In this chapter, you will get an overview of the framework’s locale support and learn how to localize your application. We will localize the News application to Spanish and we will walk through each step of the localization process. In the final section, we’ll cover some of the Internationalization APIs available in Mojo.

Users can switch languages and regions at runtime using a language preferences application, shown in Figure 11-1. Users can select from any of the languages and any of the regions, thereby creating any locale formed by those combinations.

The system does not dynamically switch languages; it must do a soft reset of the application environment, which closes any running applications and restarts the system UI with the newly selected locale.