So I work on a few Rails apps that need i18n. I thought the purrrrrfect tool to do this with would be Globalize. It seemed the most active and the least cumbersome. But lo and behold. The project has disappeared from the face of the earth and left me fucking screwed! How is that for Open Source?
This post is a bit ranty but it touches on a very real problem with Open Source. Apparently, you can never be sure that a piece of software you pick will be maintained. The developer(s) can just walk out on you and you are left in the cold.
This is exactly what happened with Globalize. Their website has disappeared completely and all remaining documentation is from 2007 or 2006. But I need this product to work and I need it to be updated, since it is breaking my tests. But now what?
Do it yourself. Yeah that’s very realistic when working on a deadline. I can understand the sentiment, after all hey you got this luverly piece of software for free right, but that just does me no good working on very real projects that need to be put in production! Also, currently there is nothing to be involved with! The website is gone, documentation is gone, the repository went poof and people using it are in the shitter.
It’s the dark side of Open Source.
If anyone has any idea if Globalize will ever come back or heck even export their repository so others can take over, I would love to know. Technorati, do your thing and get the Globalize people over here. Much obliged!
http://github.com/yannlugrin/globalize
One good thing to do if you use a plugin is to subscribe to the Mailinglist, so you know whats going on.
Here you will find the actual source code:
http://github.com/yannlugrin/globalize/tree/master
(bows humbly) this is amazing! I guess calling the technorati-gods helped. The weird thing is, I did search github but could not find Globalize. Now I realise I only searched the top-level repositories….
Dustin and Philipp: very much obliged!
Too bad the website is still offline though, I hope it comes back soon. I’ve just talked to someone else who was as surprised as me that Globalize still exists!
Yeah, the state of internationalization in Rails is pretty bad right now. I’m not betting on Globalize anymore for the time being. Have you looked into using Simple Localization?
No, but I did look into Globalite for a different project. It works really well with Rails 2.1, but the translations are in yaml files so that might not work if you want to translate via the web.
In any case globalize-rails seems to be back in business again, Sven has commented on this blog several times and a few people have contacted me privately. So Globalize might still be FTW after all.