Hello to everybody. I'm designing a software application that, among other things, does cataloguing of some objects. Time tagging is part of this cataloguing stuff. Time formats supported by the system include:
+ day/month/year for recent dates (e.g. May 5, 1821) - maybe some also require time. + d/m/y with ranges due to uncertainty of available data (e.g. Feb 10, 1720 - Feb 15, 1720) + only year on only century due to uncertainty of data (e.g. XII century AD, IV century B.C., 50,000 B.C.) + dates could be also formatted with 'strange' calendars, such as Maya etc... + there should be an unique, sortable representation for all dates Up to now, a prototype that focused on other aspects has been developed, and for what concern dates I've been using a simple integer to count days with respect to a certain reference and another int to model precision. A few hours work that was good for the prototype, but now I'm working for a second release for which I want to adopt a more stable, and possibly based on third-party libraries, solution. Joda time is for the the perfect candidate for a number of reasons, it appears to have all I need and to be easily extendable for other needs, and I appreciate a lot the fact that it has become a basis for the upcoming JSR-310 - but for some aspects that I'd like to clarify. At present, my specs for the date range are relative to "historic" date ranges, so the +/- 290 million years is quite good for me. But the customer would like to extend the system also for dates that reach to paleontologic ages, which include tens and hundreds of millions of years ago. Now I've read the FAQ: > What date range is supported? > The range supported is -292,269,054 to 292,277,023. In other words, roughly +/- 290 million years to millisecond precision. > If you want a date outside this range, ask yourself if you really want millisecond precision. In reality, dates this far in the past or future should only be stored as years - anything else is meaningless. and sure I don't need anything close to millisecond etc. precision for such an ancient date. Nevertheless I didn't understand whether Joda time is able to represent such a date as 1.500.000.000 B.C, even with a (much) lower precision. Remember that I want to keep a single representation (i.e. a single number) for every date, and I don't want to switch to variant schemas for dates before/after a certain threshold. Second question: I need to put those dates into a database. I've read about the Hibernate contrib, but I'm worried about being 0.8 and last updated more than one year ago. Furthermore, I'm using Hibernate, but hidden behind the Java Persistence API; and I could have some constraints (that at the moment I can't relax) about storing those dates as plain numbers or even strings (i.e. a number stringified), for instance when exporting XML files. I presume that converting a Joda date to/from an integer is not an issue. The project I'm working on should be opensourced, so it's likely that any extension that might be needed could be contributed back to Joda time. Thank you in advance. -- Fabrizio Giudici, Ph.D. - Java Architect, Project Manager Tidalwave s.a.s. - "We make Java work. Everywhere." weblogs.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici - www.tidalwave.it/blog [EMAIL PROTECTED] - mobile: +39 348.150.6941 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Joda-interest mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/joda-interest
