Unicode is a global character set that allows multilingual text to be displayed in a single application. This technology enables multinational corporations to develop a single multilingual application and deploy it worldwide.
Global markets require a character set that:
Oracle Forms provides Unicode support. If you use Unicode, you will be able to display multiple languages, both single-byte languages such as Western European, Eastern European, Bidirectional Middle Eastern, etc. and multi-byte Asian languages such as Chinese, Japanese, and Korean (CJK) in the same application.
Use of a single character set that encompasses all languages eliminates the need to have various character sets for various languages.
For example to display a multi-byte language such as Japanese, the NLS_LANG environment variable must be set to (for Windows platform):
Japan_Japanese.JA16SJIS
To display a single-byte language such as German, NLS_LANG must be set to (for Windows platform):
German_Germany.WE8ISO8859P1
The obvious disadvantage of this scheme is that applications can only display characters from one character set at a time. Mixed character set language data is not possible.
With the Unicode character set, you can set the character set portion of NLS_LANG to UTF8 instead of a specific language character set. This allows characters from different languages and character sets to be displayed simultaneously.
For instance to display Japanese and German together on the screen the NLS_LANG variable setting must be:
Japanese_Japan.UTF8
or
German_Germany.UTF8
The Unicode capability of Oracle Forms gives the application developer and end user the ability to display multilingual text in a form. This includes text from a database containing Unicode, multilingual text, text in GUI objects (for example, button labels), text input from the keyboard, and text from the clipboard. Oracle Forms currently supports Unicode on Windows XP and Windows 2000.
Note: If you develop applications for the Web, you can use Unicode because of the Unicode support provided by Java.