An international system may include internationalized client applications, gateways, and servers running on different platforms in different native language environments.
For example, an international system might include the following components:
Order processing applications in New York City, Mexico City, and Paris (Client-Library applications)
An inventory control server in Germany (Adaptive Server)
An order fulfillment server in France (Adaptive Server)
A central accounting application in Japan (an Open Server application working with an Adaptive Server®)
In this system, the order processing applications:
Query the inventory control server to determine if requested items are in stock
Place orders with the order fulfillment server
Send financial information to the accounting application
The inventory control server and the order fulfillment server respond to queries, and the accounting application collects financial data and generates reports.
All applications and servers use the local language and character set to accept input and generate messages.
In this system, the order processing applications and the Open Server gateway are localized by means of the LC_ALL environment variable, which specifies a locale name. At runtime, Open Client/Server applications match the specified locale name to an entry in the Sybase locales file to determine what language, character set, and collating sequence files to load.
The Adaptive Servers in this system are localized by means of a language module that is purchased and installed along with the server.