PHP in Arabic: An interview with Khaled Al-Shamaa

PHP Classes interviews Khaled Al-Shamaa about his AR-PHP project, a series of PHP classes designed to handle Arabic-language web applications. Because Arabic uses a non-Latin character set, it presents a new set of challenges.

PC: Developing Web applications in Arabic requires special care. What are the most important concerns and what components do you provide to address those concerns?

KA: Besides the search issue presented above, some of Arab countries use Hijri calendar instead of Gregorian calendar. So I developed classes to convert dates between those two calendars, as well as an Arabic version from date and strtotime PHP functions. … Another issue that is handled in this project is related to rendering Arabic text correctly in some libraries like GD, PDF, SWF and even VRML.

This interested me simply because it raises awarness of cultural, linguistic, and character set challenges that monolingual developers, or Western character set developers don’t often think about. [Via PHP Developer]