Progress
Internationalization Guide


The Advantages Of Unicode

Unicode has many advantages. Table 9–1 lists them.

Table 9–1: Unicode’s Advantages
Advantage
Explanation
Simplified application development
When an application component uses Unicode, all symbols needed by the application for reading and writing character data reside in a single code page.
This simplifies application development enormously.
Ease of migration of existing code
UTF–8 includes the traditional ASCII characters in its first 127 positions and assigns each of these characters its traditional ASCII value.
This simplifies adapting existing ASCII applications to Unicode.
Ease of providing shared access to data
Progress clients that use incompatible code pages can easily read and write a single UTF–8 database.
Progress automatically converts the code page as data passes between the client and the database.
Ease of worldwide deployment
UTF–8 databases and r-code files are multilingual.
They can be deployed worldwide.
Interoperability
Active-X and Java clients are Unicode based.
They can communicate with UTF–8 databases and application servers.
Web compatibility
Unicode is becoming the universal code page of the Web. Current Web standards require Unicode and rely on it.
Multilingual applications
Applications using Unicode can support multiple languages:
  • In the data
  • In the user interface
  • In reports


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