With the advent and popularity of the internet-based e-commerce products, the need to develop multilingual unicode-based applications is becoming increasingly important. Unfortunately, the issue of developing multilingual applications is not well addressed in available literature.

The IBM WebSphere application server is very well suited for the development and deployment of multilingual unicode-based applications, both traditional and web based. The globalization mechanism embedded in the web container of the WebSphere application server allows one to develop internationalized Servlets and JSPs to serve documents in any language and code set of choice, including unicode-based multilingual documents. The web container provides the unique features of code set customization and fine tuning. A system administrator can map language names to code sets of choice including unicode; the IANA code set names of Asian ideographic languages can be fine tuned to correspond to the JDK converters of choice.

The present paper describes the principal technical considerations behind the development and deployment of multilingual unicode-based J2EE compliant web applications. WebSphere's unique globalization mechanism including the code set customization is also explained with accompanying examples of a Servlet and a JSP for serving unicode-based multilingual documents. The ongoing and future internationalization work in WebSphere application server is also pointed out.