INTL Toolkit

Some facts about INTL:

Steven Black's INTL Toolkit is hassle-free

INTL is a snap to integrate into new and existing applications. Simply do the following:

  • Create an INTL object early in the application's startup
  • Add a line to your baseform INIT() to message INTL
  • Make GENMENUX your menu generator
  • Build your application
  • Voilà, you are basically done and ready to give a very credible demo to your boss or customer! 

INTL helps with finish and polish issues like:

  • See Downloads for GOTCHAS, a utillity that audits your project for instances of the known issues.
  • My VFP International Issues page discusses the no-nos you may have coded in your application.
  • Expunge hard-coded messages from your applcation. See Downloads for a public-domain version of MsgSvc to see how that works.

INTL retrofits easily into new and existing apps.

INTL is a great component. It is both a complete black box you can use immediately, and also a highly hooked and extendible component that you can tailor, extend, or subclass as you need.

INTL is a great component because:

  • it comes with full annotated source code.
  • it is tuned for each version of VFP for maximum performance.
  • it has great documentation.
  • its classes are explicitly named for the design patterns it used so functionality is easily unerstood.
  • it provides hooks for every action so you can easily change default behavior.
  • it provides a number of specialized localization strategies that you can add on for particular locales. For example, you would use the right-to-Left strategy to localize for the Middle East and the Orient, or add in the multi-currency strategy on forms displaying financial data.
  • you can localize strings, fonts, images, data sources, as required, with easy to configure add-in strategies for each.

INTL is high-quality source code

"...the source code itself is a treasure. I get to see a lot of source, and Steven's is among the best I've seen."

Whil Hentzen, Editor, FoxTalk Magazine

Steven Black's INTL Toolkit is a great example of literate programming. It is designed in such a way as to teach you the maximum about itself, and also about FoxPro.

Much of INTL's architecture is named explicitly after the design patterns it emulates. The result is a black box tool that'll easily become a white box in the unlikely event you need to change it to your particular circumstances.