> Taligent’s utter failure, not just as a business but also at delivering anything approaching useful software
Technology developed by Taligent landed in other projects, for instance, the Java JDK.
> in early 1996, IBM had assumed full ownership of Taligent, the joint venture started by IBM and Apple and later joined by HP. Taligent had been developing an object-oriented application framework and operating system called CommonPoint, which included extensive international support. When IBM took over, CommonPoint was mothballed, but much of the underlying technology was integrated into other IBM products.
Fairly quickly, the management of IBM and Taligent came to a realization: Java was missing international support. But Taligent had great international technology, talented engineers--including Dr. Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium--and a location about 100 meters from Sun's JavaSoft division in Cupertino, California. Thus, a partnership was born: IBM arranged for Taligent's Text and International group to contribute international classes to Sun's Java Development Kit, making Java powerful enough for real-world business applications.
For JDK 1.1, Taligent provided the new java.text package, plus a number of new classes in java.util. This included Format and all its subclasses for formatting dates, times, numbers and messages; Collator, for language-sensitive string sorting; and BreakIterator , for determining line, word, and sentence boundaries in Unicode text. In java.util, Taligent contributed parts of ResourceBundle, as well as the Calendar and TimeZone classes (which provide flexible, international-friendly date and time support). In addition, IBM contributed a large collection of locale data from their National Language Technical Center in Toronto. This API and data provide a standard way to handle the requirements of different countries and languages, making this transparent to developers.
Internationalization was certainly an important aspect of the Java language but unfortunately the first iteration of Java date and time management was a complete mess - namely while Java strings were immutual, Java date and time objects were not, making them considerably more error prone.
Technology developed by Taligent landed in other projects, for instance, the Java JDK.
> in early 1996, IBM had assumed full ownership of Taligent, the joint venture started by IBM and Apple and later joined by HP. Taligent had been developing an object-oriented application framework and operating system called CommonPoint, which included extensive international support. When IBM took over, CommonPoint was mothballed, but much of the underlying technology was integrated into other IBM products.
Fairly quickly, the management of IBM and Taligent came to a realization: Java was missing international support. But Taligent had great international technology, talented engineers--including Dr. Mark Davis, president of the Unicode Consortium--and a location about 100 meters from Sun's JavaSoft division in Cupertino, California. Thus, a partnership was born: IBM arranged for Taligent's Text and International group to contribute international classes to Sun's Java Development Kit, making Java powerful enough for real-world business applications.
For JDK 1.1, Taligent provided the new java.text package, plus a number of new classes in java.util. This included Format and all its subclasses for formatting dates, times, numbers and messages; Collator, for language-sensitive string sorting; and BreakIterator , for determining line, word, and sentence boundaries in Unicode text. In java.util, Taligent contributed parts of ResourceBundle, as well as the Calendar and TimeZone classes (which provide flexible, international-friendly date and time support). In addition, IBM contributed a large collection of locale data from their National Language Technical Center in Toronto. This API and data provide a standard way to handle the requirements of different countries and languages, making this transparent to developers.
https://icu-project.org/docs/papers/history_of_java_internat...