Re: [lang] Has anyone thought about a TimeUtils package?

[Sean Schofield]

I agree that simple time/date utilities would belong in commons/lang as opposed to a larger project like joda. This is infact what I had in mind. I will also keep in mind the potential controversey as suggested.

Here are a few scenarios that I'd like to throw out there as possibly being general enough (and not already solved by another jakarta effort or the JDK itself):

Scenario 1:

We have several remote clients who connect to our system over the Internet. The client program itself is only supposed to be in operation during a scheduled time interval. If your "session" begins at 13:00 (ignore time zones for now) and is 60 minutes long, then the client should terminate itself (with an explanation provided to the GUI) at 14:00. We can't just use a simple timer of 60 minutes b/c we can't guarantee the time that the user will enter (if they show up at all!) We can't rely on the user's system clock b/c they may be off by minutes, months or even years!

Solution:

I wrote a utility that is initialized with a time provided by the server (which we know is correct). It then compares this time to the user's system time and stores the difference. From that point on you can ask the utility for the "adjusted time." This isn't exact but the result should only be a few miliseconds which usually isn't important in these types of situations.

Scenario 2:

The user needs to see their session schedule from a JSP page. In the database we have a timezone stored so we know what timezone they are in.
Solution:

I wrote a utility that can display the schedule date/time in a specified timezone (as well as current date time) with a single method call where you provide the timezone (and some overloaded methods with basic formats to choose from).

Anyways these are two examples of the types of small utilities that might be nice to have in a TimeUtils or CalendarUtils or whatever class in commons-lang. What do people think about these specific examples and what about the idea of pooling these and some of the others mentioned (in rupert, ant, velocity, etc.) into a single spot in commons-lang? We could start it off in sandbox and see where it goes?

- sean


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