The International Macintosh Users Group presents:

Migrating PayPal to Unicode: A Case Study

Group: International Macintosh Users Group (IMUG)
(A Forum for Multilingual / Multiscript Computing)
Date: April 20, 2006, 7-9 p.m.
Speaker: Scott Atwood (PayPal)
Topic: Migrating PayPal to Unicode: A Case Study
Location: Apple Computer, Apple Campus, 1 Infinite Loop, Cupertino
Take Saratoga/Sunnyvale exit off 280, turn South into
Cupertino, turn left onto Mariani Avenue, left into
Infinite Loop. Meeting is held in the Singapore Room.
Please arrive by 7:10, as the door is not monitored
after this time.
Admission: $4; free for IMUG members
Contact: Roger Sherman, (650) 859-5981
roger [dot] sherman [at] sri [dot] com

PayPal, with 80 million registered users, is a high volume website that
processes millions of financial transactions every day. In 2003 PayPal
was only localized for the United States and the United Kingdom and used
US-ASCII from the browser all the way to the DB. In 2004 PayPal embarked
on an ambitious project to completely revise all string handling to use
Unicode end-to-end without disrupting PayPal's business or its terabytes
of existing data. This case study will discuss that project from
inception to completion, exploring the challenges we faced, the choices
we made both good and bad, as well as the final outcomes. A testament to
success of the project is that nobody noticed we did it.

Scott Atwood is a software engineer at PayPal where he is currently
working on the China localization team. Prior to that he contributed to
PayPal's Unicode migration project, and he continues to be a key source
of Unicode expertise at the company.

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