Martin @ Blog

Dutch version can be found at the Finalist IT Group weblog.

Since the start of the development of JDK 7, there is quite some discussion on the API’s in the standard Java libraries which covers date and time. In the current Java version (1.6) there are roughly three major (groups of) classes which are responsible for handling date and time: Date and Calendar, the formatting classes, and the classes in the java.sql package, including java.sql.Date, java.sql.Time and java.sql.Timestamp. Most developers agree that these classes are far from perfect.

In order to resolve this issue, JSR-310 is started to improve the date and time API in the standard Java libraries. However, due to lack of developers and slow progress, it became very uncertain if the JSR would be ready for inclusion in JDK 7 (which will eventually become Java 7, the name I will use in the rest of this article). JSR-310 is lead by Stephan Colebourne and Michael Nascimento Santos. Colebourne is the original author of the increasingly popular Joda Time project, which is a replacement for the default Java date and time API’s. At Devoxx 2009, taking place last November, Mark Reinhold of Sun announced that Java 7 will be delayed until September 2010 at the earliest. Stephan Colebourne sees this as a opportunity to release at least a partially complete JSR-310 in time for the upcoming Java release. (more…)