Tim Habersack

Where I put my things..

Should I trash my old i18n project or revamp it?

Apr 25th 2016

So, three years ago I created a project called Lemon-Filling. From the repos readme:

Lemon-filling is a tool to build i18n support into your small to medium-sized application. With Lemon-filling, you can create terms, define those terms in various locales, and group terms together into pages. Via MySQL query in your application, ask for a page, specify the locale you desire, and all terms on that page will be returned. Comes with web-based admin area to create and manage your localized content.

At the time, it seemed to make sense, and I wanted a tool so I could add internationalization to my web apps. I used the tools I knew to build it. Also, I think the grouping of terms by the 'page' they are on had merit.

However, having a separate DB for storing all the language of a project and having to have an extra query on every page load now seems excessive. A better approach would be to poll then cache some JSON of all the language needed for the app. I just thought of that, and dang that makes this more useful..

Anyway, the admin interface was built on top of CodeIgniter 2.1.3, which, thanks to PHP becoming a better and better language, has some errors now on every page load. Also, the repo on github has no stars or anything; as far as I can tell no one uses it.

There is some basic work that would need to be done in order for it to get working again, and no one (including me) is using it right now. Should I just delete the repo?

I do like my modified use I described above, and caching all the web apps language in some JSON. However, I don’t really have a burning desire to do this. Also, there would need to be work done to actually make this a thing that can be easily pulled into other projects.

Oh snap. This could be a free service for open source projects. I could see that being really helpful. I will spec out my idea, and float it out to several i18n groups and see if it would even be something they’d want to try/use.