Tuesday 22 February 2005

Joda-Time 1.0 released

Yes, its finally here! Joda-Time, the replacement for JDK Date and Calendar (and much more) has reached 1.0!

Full details can be found on the website. However, let me draw out a few key features:

- Easy to Use - Calendar makes accessing 'normal' dates difficult, due to the lack of simple methods. Joda-Time has straightforward field accessors. And the index of January is 1!

- Extensible - Joda-Time supports multiple calendar systems via a plugin mechanism, which is much more extensible than the subclasses of Calendar. Currently supported calendars are ISO8601, GregorianJulian, Buddhist (Thai) and Coptic.

- Comprehensive - Joda-Time includes classes for datetimes, dates without times, times without dates, intervals and time periods.

- Advanced formatting - An advanced and extensible formatting mechanism is included, allowing input and output to string in a thread-safe manner.

- Well documented. There is documentation in the form of a quick and full user guide, plus reference pages, FAQs and javadoc.

- Tested. There is good test coverage, see the website, providing an assurance of quality.

- Built in security. Advanced operations that could prove a security risk (like changing the current time) are protected by standard JDK security.

And if you learn best by an example:

public boolean isRentalOverdue(DateTime datetimeRented) {
  Period rentalPeriod = Period.days(2);
  return datetimeRented.plus(rentalPeriod).isBeforeNow()
}
public boolean isJoinedInLastThreeMonths(DateTime datetimeJoined) {
  Interval last3Months = new Interval(Period.months(3), new DateTime());
  return last3Months.contains(datetimeJoined);
}
public boolean isBirthdayInLeapYear(YearMonthDay dateOfBirth) {
  return dateOfBirth.year().isLeap();
}

So, now its released, what next? Well I hope that some of you reading this will want to help add some other calendar systems, such as Hebrew, Islamic, Chinese, etc. Any takers?

Wednesday 16 February 2005

Joda-Time 0.99 done, 1.0 on its way...

Yes, after lots of late nights, version 0.99 of Joda-Time (the replacement for JDK Date and Calendar, and much much more) is out in the wild.

The plan is to get a few days feedback on 0.99, remove the deprecated methods, then release as 1.0 next week (and definitely before the end of February).

By the way, if you used version 0.98, you'll need to read the release notes, as there were a few last minute changes between 0.98 and 0.99. But I'm determined to let nothing stop 1.0 ;-)

Oh, and if you want to help out by developing another calendar system, Hebrew, Islamic, Chinese, Thai, Japanese,... just drop me a line !