Like in almost every project we had to implement a internationalization and localization mechanism. We started to use Java’s standard ResourceBundle-concept. But after some weeks we had property-files which didn’t really fit to the used localization-keys in our application. This is a common problem which is due to refactoring.

Inspired by the internationalization-feature in Google’s Web Toolkit we wanted to create a solution, which can be tracked by the compiler. GWT is using its own compiler to create the client-javascript. And there is a separate compilation for every Locale. So it is very easy for GWT to create javascript-code to get the localized messages. The used javascript-code is selected by GWT on the client side based on the user’s Locale. All you have to do is to implement the Messages-interface and use it in your application. The solution is very convenient. For example, you can use the java-reference-search in your IDE and the GWT-Compiler even fails, if you miss to declare a translation in your property-files for a method in the Messages-Interface.

Our Goal: Instead of

Messages.getString("example");

we want to use

Messages.get().example();

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