Internationalization (i18n) is the process of making your application support multiple languages. This can be a complex task, but Spring Boot makes it much easier. In this post, we'll take a look at how to implement i18n in a Spring Boot application.
Internationalization (i18n) is the process of making your application support multiple languages. This can be a complex task, but Spring Boot makes it much easier.
There are many reasons why you might want to add i18n support to your application. Maybe you have users all over the world and want to offer them a localized experience. Or maybe you're just building a personal project and want to learn how to add i18n support. Whatever the reason, i18n is a valuable skill to have.
Spring Boot makes it easy to add i18n support to your application. In this section, we'll take a look at how to do just that.
First, you need to add the i18n dependencies to your pom.xml
file:
<dependency>
<groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
<artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>
Next, you need to configure the i18n properties in your application.properties
file:
spring.mvc.locale=en
spring.messages.basename=i18n/messages
Now you need to create the i18n files. These files will contain the translated messages for your application. You can create these files in src/main/resources/i18n
.
For example, let's say you want to support English and French. You would create the following files:
messages_en.properties
messages_fr.properties
In these files, you would define the translated messages for your application. For example:
# messages_en.properties
greeting=Hello
# messages_fr.properties
greeting=Bonjour
Now that you have the i18n files configured, you can use the translated messages in your code. For example, let's say you have a controller with the following method:
@RequestMapping("/greeting")
public String greeting(Model model) {
model.addAttribute("message", "greeting");
return "greeting";
}
This method will render the greeting.ftl
template with the message
attribute set to the greeting
key from the i18n files. So if the spring.mvc.locale
property is set to en
, the message
attribute will be set to Hello
. If the spring.mvc.locale
property is set to fr
, the message
attribute will be set to Bonjour
.
In this post, we've looked at how to add i18n support to a Spring Boot application. i18n can be a complex task, but Spring Boot makes it much easier. By following the steps in this post, you can add i18n support to your application with ease.