excelbundle
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excelbundle

Last modified: 2006-07-13

Mission Statement

To create a useful tool that can ease the translation of Java applications for many people.

Background

In software projects, language translation is often done by non-developers.In Java, strings and other resources are often stored in resource bundles, that is, a bunch of .properties files containing the same keys but different values. These resource bundles aren't very friendly to the translator. The solution is excelbundle. excelbundle is a little tool that converts these resource bundles to Excel spreadsheets. Excel files are easier for non-developers as they probably have Excel installed, and if not, they can use OpenOffice.org or such. When received back from the translator, excelbundle can merge the result back into the source tree.

Project Summary

excelbundle uses Apache POI to read and write Excel spreadsheet and uses a smart diff algorithm that only changes files with keys that have been changed to make it compatible with popular version control systems. All comments and newlines are retained in the properties files that already exist as excelbundle doesn't use the default Java Properties class for writing.

Other features include:

• export only those keys which are untranslated
• create a completely new language that doesn't exist yet
• show statistics on how many keys/files that were created/changed/deleted
• pretend mode that does no changes to files on disk but prints out what would be done
• ant tasks to automate the exporting and importing
• excelbundle can map different keys to different sheets in the workbook depending on what file or directory they're in

Files and downloads

The latest release, excelbundle 0.9, can be found here.

Participation

For any questions about the project, patches or if you want to participate, send an email to Emil Eriksson, shadewind[at]gmail[dot]com.