Specific message catalog techniques for web application

Question

I have a web application that has user-readable text in three places: C source for CGI programs, JavaScript in .js files, and .HTML files and we are considering internationalization. I once worked on I18N of a PC-based program written in C and Tcl. We used common message catalogs that we could access from both languages. I'm not at all sure how that technique would apply to a web application. I've seen several articles on StackOverflow about "considerations for I18N" but my question is about the specific technology for storing and retrieving text in a web app. How is this usually done?

Answer 1

The major Web application frameworks provide easy ways to provide common resource files for localised text.

So, typically, a Web application might have a pointer to a resource instead of literal text in the markup source. A processing engine will replace the resource with the literal when the user requests a page.

For example, ASP.NET uses resource files, Java has .properties files, each of which can provide substitution at runtime.