Car Configurator Multilingual Architecture
Overall Architecture
Figure 1 below shows the schematic architecture of the Car Configurator.
There are also some screenshots available here.
Figure 1: Schematic View of the Car Configurator
Architecture
This architecture has been developed as a function of the specific
characteristics of the car configuration process:
- Marketing Purpose:
The application serves to attract clients and thus has to provide
a high quality user interface. Application failures or linguistic
mistakes are not tolerable.
- Maintenance Emphasis:
Car product configuration information is changing frequently,
so that comfortable maintenance procedures became a hard requirement
for the project. We decided to implement an Excel configuration
interface for this phase of the project. Later project phases
will feature an integrated product definition environment.
- Language and Country Specific Configuration:
The product configuration is dependent both on language and country.
For instance, the Swiss product configuration is available in
the three languages of Switzerland (German, French and Italian),
while the German language is used in the German, Austrian and
Swiss country configurations.
- Price and Currencies:
Euro, Swiss Franc, German Mark and Spanish Peseta are supported
as currencies, including a complex configuration to provide rounded
numbers for all major product options.
- Language and Country Specific Graphics:
Graphical GUI elements can depend on language (text GIFs) or country
(product appearance).
- Localization and Configuration Fallback Handling:
The combination of language, country and product specific GIFs
results in a combinatory explosion of the number of graphical
elements. As a consequence, a fallback system handles missing
GIFs for specific combinations and returns more generic images
instead. Using this technique we were able to reduce the number
of GIFs by a factor of 10 to about 1000. Fallback events are reported
to the Workflow System for manual inspection.
Architecture Details
Figure 2 below shows a simplified class diagram for the Car Configurator
that shows the various subsystems from Figure 1.
Figure 2: Schematic Car Configurator Class Diagram
Please note the Localization Subsystem on the right hand side.
Its access class "Loc" defines a single static method
- Loc.getText(String key, String family, Locale locale)
that returns a language and country specific representation for
any localizable item. It uses the Java default ResourceBundle structure
as storage for the localization items. These ResourceBundles are
filled with information coming from several RBLoader classes, which
coincide with the ObjectFactories. This is a convenient solution
because the ObjectFactory classes already have access to the underlying
data sources.
Please contact me if you have
doubts or questions. I am also available as a freelance consultant.
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