Spring provides excellent support for localization or i18n through resource bundles. Basis steps needed to make our application localized are:
Creating message resource bundles for different locales, such as messages_en.properties, messages_fr.properties etc.
Defining messageSource bean in the spring bean configuration file of type ResourceBundleMessageSource or ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource.
For change of locale support, define localeResolver bean of type CookieLocaleResolver and configure LocaleChangeInterceptor interceptor. Example configuration can be like below:
<beans:bean id="messageSource"
class="org.springframework.context.support.ReloadableResourceBundleMessageSource">
<beans:property name="basename" value="classpath:messages" />
<beans:property name="defaultEncoding" value="UTF-8" />
</beans:bean>
<beans:bean id="localeResolver"
class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.CookieLocaleResolver">
<beans:property name="defaultLocale" value="en" />
<beans:property name="cookieName" value="myAppLocaleCookie"></beans:property>
<beans:property name="cookieMaxAge" value="3600"></beans:property>
</beans:bean>
<interceptors>
<beans:bean class="org.springframework.web.servlet.i18n.LocaleChangeInterceptor">
<beans:property name="paramName" value="locale" />
</beans:bean>
</interceptors>
Use spring:message element in the view pages with key names, DispatcherServlet picks the corresponding value and renders the page in corresponding locale and return as response.
For a complete example, please read Spring Localization Example.
