cameronyule.com

For anyone working on a Rails application which deals with countries or languages, the official source of data is the International Standards Association, specifically ISO 3166 for countries and ISO 639 for languages.

To make it easier to get this data into your Rails application, I’ve created two generators which automatically create the models, migrations and data you’ll need and bundled them up in a handy Rails plug-in.

Usage couldn’t be simpler…

script/plugin install git://github.com/cameronyule/isodata.git

If you want country data…

script/generate countries
rake db:migrate
rake isodata:db:countries

…and for languages…

script/generate languages
rake db:migrate
rake isodata:db:languages

Check out the isodata project on Github.

After the announcement yesterday that Rails 2.2 will have support for internationalisation (i18n) in the core, I read the linked articles and was slightly surprised that rather than unifying/replacing the i18n plugins currently available, it will actually provide an API which makes creating a back-end for handling your locales easier.

I’ve been using Globalite in the Rails project I’m working on and while it’s the best solution I’ve tried, I was always frustrated by the use of YAML for it’s locale files. Thankfully the changes in Rails 2.2 will likely mean a move to pure Ruby locale files, introducing the benefits of namespaces and the ability to override/extend generic files with site-specific ones.

Now we just have to wait a few months for the release and see what plugins adapt/appear to take advantage of it.