Customer i18n overlays with GWT

I’m building a web backoffice for an IT product with GWT for several month now. I had to internationalize all the UI. GWT provides several mechanisms for i18n. I use Constants and Messages because I love the compile time check and the fact that deferred binding permutations provide a download as small as possible to the users.

All this worked well until we wanted to provide customers the ability to change how things are named in our product. In the UI layer of course !

Like said above, GWT is using deferred binding to provide a Constant/Message implementation per locale. I extended this mechanism to provide a Constant/message implementation per locale and a given GWT property.

Enough talk, lets see how this is done.