Stephen Colebourne's blog: February 2017

The java.time.* API (JSR-310) was added to Java SE 8, but what has been going on since then?

Java Time in Java SE 9

There are currently 117 java time issues targetted into Java SE 9. Most of these are not especially interesting, with a lot of mistakes in the Javadoc that needed fixing. What follows are some of the interesting ones:

Main enhancements:

JDK-8146218 - Add LocalDate.datesUntil method producing Stream.
Adds two new methods - LocalDate.datesUntil(LocalDate) and LocalDate.datesUntil(LocalDate,Period) - returning a stream of dates.

JDK-8068730 - Increase precision of Clock.systemUTC().
The clock in Java - System.currentTimeMillis() - has ticked in milliseconds since Java was first released. With Java SE 9, users of Clock will see higher precision, depending on the available clock of the operating system.

JDK-8071919 - Clock.tickMillis(ZoneId zone) method.
With the system clock now returning higher precision, a new method was added - Clock.tickMillis(ZoneId) - that chops off the extra precision to restrore the millisecond ticking behaviour of Java SE 8.

JDK-8030864 - Add efficient getDateTimeMillis method to java.time.
This adds two methods named epochSecond to Chronology that have no object creation to convert date-time fields to an epoch-second.

JDK-8142936 - Duration methods for days, hours, minutes, seconds, etc.
The Java SE 8 API of Duration turned out to be incomplete for certain use cases. This change adds a slew of new methods that allow parts of the duration to be reliably returned.

JDK-8148849 - Truncating Duration.
Adds a method Duration.truncatedTo(TemporalUnit) to allow truncation, similar to the existing method on Instant.

JDK-8032510 - Add Duration.dividedBy(Duration).
A new method to allow a duration to be divided by another duration.

JDK-8133079 - LocalDate and LocalTime ofInstant() factory methods.
Add new factory methods in LocalDate and LocalTime to simplify conversion from Instant.

JDK-8143413 - Add toEpochSecond methods for efficient access.
Add methods to LocalDate, LocalTime and OffsetTime to optimize conversion to epoch-seconds.

Formatting:

JDK-8148947 - DateTimeFormatter pattern letter 'g'.
This adds a pattern letter for modified Julian days.

JDK-8155823 - Add date-time patterns 'v' and 'vvvv'.
This adds support for the "generic non-location" format for time-zones as defined by CLDR, such as "Pacific Time" (the format ignores daylight saving time). Methods were also added to the formatter builder - DateTimeFormatterBuilder.appendGenericZoneText().

JDK-8066806 - DateTimeFormatter cannot parse offset with single digit hour.
The formatter is extended to support 11 more time-zone offset formats, including single digit hours such as +2:00.

JDK-8031085 - DateTimeFormatter won't parse format "yyyyMMddHHmmssSSS".
This extends support for adjacent value parsing to fractions. Where in Java SE 8 a pattern like this looks like it should work, but doesn't, in Java SE 9 it just works.

JDK-8145633 - Adjacent value parsing for Localized Patterns .
This extends support for adjacent value parsing to localized patterns, such as week-based-year and week of year.

JDK-8148949 - DateTimeFormatter pattern letters 'A','n','N'.
These patterns were altered to be more flexible and produce less errors.

Performance:

JDK-8073394 - Clock.systemUTC() should return a constant.
This change avoids creating unecessary objects when using Clock.

JDK-8074003 - ZoneRules.getOffset(Instant) can be optimized.
This change reduces object churn when looking up time-zone data.

JDK-8074002 - ZoneId.systemDefault() should be faster.
This enhancement uses a clever approach to cache the time-zone while handling TimeZone.setDefault.

JDK-8068803 - Performance of LocalDate.plusDays could be better.
This optimizes LocalDate.plusDays for the common case of adding a small number of days.

JDK-8066291 - ZoneIdPrinterParser can be optimized.
The method ZoneRulesProvider.getAvailableZoneIds() now returns an immutable set, not a mutable one. Since most user code calls ZoneRules.getAvailableZoneIds(), it will be unaffected.

Thanks

Thanks for all these bug fixes and enhancements go to the many contributors, both inside and outside Oracle. (I've mostly been a reviewer, rather than an author, which has worked pretty well overall.)