Next.js development for Abu Dhabi government and energy

Abu Dhabi buys software differently from Dubai, and the difference is not a matter of degree.

The buyers here are government entities, energy and utility groups, sovereign-backed companies and the system integrators working for them. The commercial relationship is often one step removed - we are a subcontractor to the integrator who holds the contract - and the language relationship is reversed from what most multilingual projects assume.

Arabic first inverts the routing

Almost every multilingual site is built English-first with other languages added. An Abu Dhabi entity's site is usually the opposite, and that is an architectural decision rather than a content one.

If Arabic is the primary language, then the Arabic version is the one that should sit at the unprefixed root and carry the canonical URL, with English as the prefixed alternate. That single decision determines which version search engines treat as the main one, where the x-default alternate points, and what a visitor with no stated language preference is served.

It is also close to irreversible. Changing the primary locale after launch changes every URL on the site, which means redirects for everything that ranked. How hreflang and alternates actually work is the reading, and this is the one place where the default setup of most starter projects is actively wrong for the market.

Two scripts in one Abu Dhabi document

Government and energy content mixes languages constantly - an Arabic page naming an English-titled standard, a system name, a unit, a code sample.

Right-to-left layout handles a page that is entirely Arabic. It does not handle a mixed string unless each foreign fragment is marked with its own language and direction. Without that, a full stop after a Latin company name migrates to the wrong end of the line, and a bracketed English term appears with its brackets reversed.

This is the most visible category of defect in an Arabic interface and the easiest to ship, because it is invisible to anybody reviewing the page in English. The practical discipline is that every injected name, label or number gets its direction stated at the point of use rather than assumed from the page. The groundwork for Arabic interfaces generally is on the Dubai page, which is where the typography and layout mirroring belong.

Working underneath an integrator

The contracting shape here is worth being explicit about, because it affects what we produce rather than just who pays.

When an integrator holds the client relationship, the deliverable is not a running site and a conversation - it is code that somebody else has to present, defend and maintain in front of their client. That raises the value of written architecture decisions enormously, so they get written during the work rather than compiled at the end from memory.

It also means agreeing two things before scoping: who owns the client conversation, and what exactly the handover consists of. Both are cheap to settle in week zero and expensive to discover in month four.

Commercially

Scope fixed in writing before work starts, priced per project. The country-level ground - the entity question, e-invoicing obligations, free zone against mainland - is on the UAE market page.

Invoiced by Codefacture Yazılım A.Ş. in Türkiye, in US dollars, by bank transfer, with no Turkish VAT because exported services are exempt.