Multi-byte character
sets are appropriately and thoroughly taken into consideration in
the database, application server, and browser tiers of Sterling Selling and
Fulfillment Foundation.
To represent all the characters in a language, it is sometimes necessary
to use 2 (double byte) or 3 (multi-byte) bytes for each character.
The longer character representations can, however, pose space and
transmission challenges during application development.
- Double Byte Character Set
(DBCS): One of a number of character sets defined for representing
Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text (for example, JIS X 0208-1990).
These character sets are often encoded in such a way as to allow double-byte
character encoding to be mixed with single-byte character encoding.
- Multibyte Character Set (MBCS):
A character set encoded with a variable number of bytes for each character.
Many large character sets have been defined as multi-byte character
sets in order to keep strict compatibility with the standards of the
ASCII subset, the ISO and IEC 2022.
The Sterling Selling and
Fulfillment Foundation architecture
ensures that:
- All data is stored in
the database using a standard compression algorithm known as UTF-8.
- The application is coded in Java™, which can handle multi-byte character
sets without any special changes.
- All communication between
the database and the application server is through Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), which transforms
the UTF-8 database representation of data to and from the multi-byte
character set.
- All communication between the application server
and the client is through UTF-8, which minimizes data transmission
volume.
- All clients are expected to receive and send data
using the UTF-8 algorithm.