PEAR::Translation2 considered bad.

The basic idea of both is to create string tables, where you can look up a keyword/word/phrase and get the translation for the selected language.

First, there's gettext:

• It is proven technology as the traditional UNIX i18n/l10n tool.


• It is bundled with stock PHP, though you have to enable it.


• It is fast


• It has sweet syntactic sugar: _()


• It has the nice plural support feature of ngettext()


• There are tools to extract strings from the PHP files and put them into the string table


• There is a Smarty Plugin that makes localizing Smarty templates easier, too.

So, thats all great. But I guess, it isn't OO-fashionable, so someone had to go and reinvent the wheel classfully, and badly at that: PEAR::Translation2.

• No syntactic sugar, no tools.


• According to the (sucky) documentation, the recommended way of storing translations is in a database. Hello? Does anybody really think it is a good idea to hit the database some 100 times per page to fetch each and every translation from the database? Especially as translation string tables are static data.


• Ok, maybe the authors also think that fetching each string individually isn't so clever. So there is getPage() to fetch the whole translation table. Theoretically, you can fetch groups of strings by pages, but this is useless if you don't want duplicate translations for strings you use on multiple pages. That brings us to...


• the database schema design.
  You can choose between:
  One translation table, with one column for each language.
  Or: A separate translation table for each language.
  Please. If you have to reinvent the wheel, can't you do it with a good book about relational databases at your side?
  Oh, and the expected data types of the columns aren't documented, but you can set their names to your heart's contents, if that consoles you.


• There is a gettext backend too, but I have no idea why they use File::Gettext instead of the gettext extension. The configuration is dreadful, too.

Summary: Translation2: Lots of unnecessary complexity combined with ugly backends for less features. (Only the Decorators might be nice.) Give me gettext!