Stefan Kleineikenscheidt on Integration Architecture and Engineering

Sunday March 23, 2008

java.util.GregorianCalendar sucks

I have seen two bugs lately, which were directly related to the GregorianCalendar:

• GregorianCalendar and XMLGregorianCalendar count the time differently. While XMLGregorianCalendar starts counting the months with ‘1′, the standard GregorianCalendar starts with ‘0′.
• If you use GregorianCalendar.HOUR, this will make the
  GregorianCalendar to use a 12-hour clock, which resulted in a bug which only occured after midday.

While these quirks can be considered as must-have knowledge for a Java
developer, they still suck.

As a result of these bugs, I have started introducing Joda-time in some of projects I work on. This is probably not big news for some of you, but it seems that Joda-time is much easier to use.

What are your experiences with Joda-time?

Posted on Mar 23, 2008 at 19:50 (MET) | Permalink | 4 comments