David Deraedt

This project was discontinued.

You can grab the source here.

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Lupo is a set of tools designed to help localizing Adobe® Flex® and Adobe AIR® applications.

As of today, lupo is comprised of three parts :

Lupo Manager, an Adobe AIR application, helps developers extract strings from their source code, manage resource bundles and implement i18n logic in their Adobe Flex / Adobe AIR applications, in a very productive way.

Lupo Translator is a Computer Aided Translation tool dedicated to Adobe Flex, Adobe AIR and Java resource bundle localization. It's a properties file editor for translators who want a professional tool that is both powerful and easy to use. For Windows, MacOSX and Linux systems.

Finally Lupo Services helps you implement localization in your Flex application through consulting, development and translation services. For more informations about those services, please contact me via email.

About lupo

Motivations

Localizing your applications is a great way to naturally increase revenues simply by opening new markets. After all, what's the point of having a 98%+ player penetration rate, an über ubiquitous desktop/browser/mobile & devices presence, if half of the users can't use the application simply because they don't understand it ?

However, as a consultant, I realized that internationalization (i18n) and localization (L10n) are often considered as scary, complicated topics. Sure, Flex provides a very decent API to deal with resource bundles, but implementing this feature still requires a lot of work. First, it implies a good organization and architecture, and second, it takes a long list of repetitive, un-agile, tedious tasks to finally get the job done.

So that's why, some months ago, I decided to create a tool which would help me manage properties files for my client projects. The first idea was to parse my source code to extract the localizable strings and create the corresponding Key/Value pairs in the properties files. Over time, I improved the application to create a sophisticated set of tools and practices which have tremendously improved my productivity.

Workflow overview

(diagram made using Lovely Charts)

Now, having a tool for helping us developers is great, but you can't forget that we need work with translators to actually get the job done. However, not only is it hard to find professional, experienced translators, but when you have found one, you have to be able to communicate with her, and integrate her work in your agile/iterative workflow. Translators have to work with data coming in very different forms, and not all of them have a decent tool to work with properties file.

In this regard, I created separate AIR app, lupo translator, which is a small, very easy to use Computer Aided Translation tool. You may notice that lupo translator is actually is small subset of lupo manager: it's actually the bundle translation tab slightly modified to better correspond to translators use. Of course, lupo manager does not require your translators to work with lupo translator. Inversely, lupo translator can be used to work with data which is not coming from lupo manager.

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