Although .properties files are used to give multi-language support in JSP pages, they are not just restricted to Java platform — libraries exist for JavaScript, Ruby, Perl, Flex and a whole slew of other languages). When used in multi-developer environments, they can get rather messy and they can be rather translator unfriendly. In this article, you’ll see how you can quickly fix these issues with z4n, a set of shell scripts I created to manage .properties files and includes tools for developers to extract translation data from Excel spreadsheets. Read on, and I’ll show you how to keep .properites files sane for all your web projects.

[Read more »]