Multibyte character sets

Multi-byte character sets are appropriately and thoroughly taken into consideration in the database, application server, and browser tiers of Sterling Order Management System Software. To represent all the characters in a language, it is sometimes necessary to use 2 (double byte) or 3 (multi-byte) bytes for each character.

The longer character representations can, however, pose space and transmission challenges during application development.

• Double Byte Character Set (DBCS): One of a number of character sets defined for representing Chinese, Japanese, or Korean text (for example, JIS X 0208-1990). These character sets are often encoded in such a way as to allow double-byte character encoding to be mixed with single-byte character encoding.
• Multibyte Character Set (MBCS): A character set encoded with a variable number of bytes for each character. Many large character sets have been defined as multi-byte character sets in order to keep strict compatibility with the standards of the ASCII subset, the ISO and IEC 2022.

The Sterling Order Management System Software architecture ensures that:

• All data is stored in the database using a standard compression algorithm known as UTF-8.
• The application is coded in Java™, which can handle multi-byte character sets without any special changes.
• All communication between the database and the application server is through Java Database Connectivity (JDBC), which transforms the UTF-8 database representation of data to and from the multi-byte character set.
• All communication between the application server and the client is through UTF-8, which minimizes data transmission volume.
• All clients are expected to receive and send data using the UTF-8 algorithm.