Has anyone had any experiences developing large Java applications using GNU gettext for internationalization? I find that I really like having the English text in my source code, but I want to make sure that what I’m doing is practical for the relatively large software project I am part of.
If you have experience with this, what are you using to look up the resources in Java? I’m currently trying out Gettext Commons (http://code.google.com/p/gettext-commons/), which seems to be working well so far.
Any alternatives to gettext that keep the original text in your source code? A similar tool that is supported on Windows would be great.
The JSOM open source OpenStreetMap Java editor project is using the Gettext library to handle all its translations and it is working out very well as people are able to use a variate of translation tools (like KBabel, poedit, launchpad…) to work with the po files so there is no platform constraint there.
Also I don’t quite see why you think the mentioned setup cannot be used on any platform – you can certainly use gettext in Windows see: here or here
Given how popular gettext is I would certainly recommend it.