Table 9–1: Unicode’s advantages
|
Advantage
|
Explanation
|
|
Simplified application development.
|
When an application component uses Unicode, all symbols needed by the application for reading and writing character data reside in a single code page.
This simplifies application development enormously.
|
|
Ease of migration of existing code.
|
UTF-8 includes the traditional ASCII characters in its first 127 positions and assigns each of these characters its traditional ASCII value.
This simplifies adapting existing ASCII applications to Unicode.
|
|
Ease of providing shared access to data.
|
OpenEdge clients that use incompatible code pages can easily read and write a single UTF-8 database.
OpenEdge automatically converts the code page as data passes between the client and the database.
|
|
Ease of worldwide deployment.
|
UTF-8 databases and r-code files are multi-lingual.
They can be deployed worldwide.
|
|
Interoperability.
|
Active-X and Java clients are Unicode based.
They can communicate with UTF-8 databases and AppServers.
|
|
Web compatibility.
|
Unicode is becoming the universal code page of the Web. Current Web standards require Unicode and rely on it.
|
|
Multi-lingual applications.
|
Applications using Unicode can support multiple languages in:
- The data
- The user interface
- Reports
|