japanese windows

[andy uehara]

Hello all,
(If you don't like computer lingo jump to SUMMARY at
the bottom, otherwise read on)
regarding the japanese filemaker problem. Being only a
novice programmer I can only guess, but here goes:
English is based off of the Unicode 256 bit system.
Japanese has many more characters then english so
needs more then the 256 bit system, they call them
multi-byte characters. (more on Unicode:
http://www.unicode.org/)
I know that all the olderversions of windows were
built locally meaning that 98 windows in japan is
different
from 98 windows in America. I know that microsoft is
working on this, but as of windows 2000 (I have) there
is no support for this. I am guessing that windows xp
does support this, but you have to pay extra (hence to
get japanese office (content creation) you need to buy
officexp and the multi-linugal pack (so you can enter
other characters)).
As for the filemaker problem, I would suggest going
around this by using another database. Perhaps MySql
(http://www.mysql.com/) although all comercial non-GPL
licenses (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html) will
cost you about 89$ a pop for quantities over 50. (GPL
means it's free as long as you don't make the code
proprietary. in this case it would mean realising all
the source code for this product.) There is also mSql,
(http://www.hughes.com.au/products/msql/). I found
another site which says they are free for universities
and schools, non-commercial research organisations,
registered not-for-profit organisations, registered
charities and churches. But, Valerie you might want to
check for the true story. More information about mSQL
you can get at the official homepage of this product.
I know there are java-database connector beans out
there, to connect to these established databases.
Both databases can handle multiple-languages. There
are a ton of scripting stuff for it too. And I am
pretty sure that both will run on windows, mac osx,9,
and *nix machines. They might be a bit big for
embedding (at least at the moment).

SUMMARY:
Japanese windows and american windows are two separate
products, similar to windows and macs. The
incompatibility probably lies there. A possible
solution is to use Unicode character processing or get
a new database program aka: MySql, mSql. I think there
are more out there, but these are pretty popular and
tested. Both will work on just about any machine and
handle multiple-languages.

my 2 cents,
andy uehara

ps. I am on the weekly list, so I won't be able to
read any responses until next week.

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