If your Web site targets an international audience, consider letting users select the language or nationality they prefer. For each language or nationality, besides translating the text, you can adapt graphics, images, layout, and content. For example, if you are building a Portuguese-language Web site that deals with currency and taxes and that targets users in Portugal and in Brazil, you can adapt the content to deal with Portuguese currency and taxes as well as with Brazilian currency and taxes.
Also, consider using UTF-8 (an encoding of Unicode) for the encoding of the database and for the CPINTERNAL code page of the WebSpeed agents. This approach is strongly recommend by Progress Software Corporation. For more information on Unicode, see OpenEdge Development: Internationalizing Applications.
The following figure shows a WebSpeed configuration that supports an international Web site.
Figure 8. WebSpeed configuration that supports an international Web site
This configuration creates a Web site that handles requests from users in Spain, Japan, and the United States. In this example, all countries share a single Unicode (UTF-8) database. This particular Web site expects the highest rate of access from its Spanish users, so it has multiple Transaction Servers and agent pools configured to handle the Web requests. These Transaction Servers are, in turn, registered with a NameServer. The NameServer can manage the Spanish Transaction Servers as they have access to equivalent resources, that is, their agents are all configured identically: they use the same internal code page and they connect to the same database in the same manner. Web requests coming from Japanese and U.S. users are each serviced by a single Transaction Server and its agent pool.
