Internationalization and Localization can retrieve texts for internationalized applications from databases or plain text files (XML or INIs). It provides a base data source class that defines an interface with functions to retrieve texts given their element identifiers, the language to use, the locale for a language (optional), the application section and an eventual container object of a class that is used to retrive the actual internationalized texts.

The base class interface also provides a function to retrieve the list of supported languages, and locales. The package comes with implementation classes that know how to access the data source container objects to retrieve the texts, supported languages and locales.

Currently there are implementation classes that can retrieve the information from either databases or plain text files (in the form of XML or INI files.) Other implementation classes can be developed to retrieve the information from other data sources, such as LDAP repositories.