Thanks Joda!

Joda-Time is great. Seriously. It has been a pleasure to work with from the beginning. It was amazing how valuable Jodas LocalDates are when you simply need exactly that: a date without any consideration of time zones.

I even wrote a JPA 2.1 AttributeConverter<LocalDate, Integer> in order to use the LocalDate as attribute type for my JPA entities and keep mindful table rows (i. e. not with a binary blob), that are even sortable. However, this forced me to provide JodaTime as library to the GlassFish (I chose to use the common classloader). I cannot precisely recall what went wrong when deploying JodaTime as maven compile time dependency. In fact, I was rudely reminded of the need to put JodaTime into the library folder of my GlassFish when I set up my dev environment on a new system. It simply didn’t work out of the box.

Time to leave

I decided that this incident was a good reason to switch from JodaTime to the new JDK8 Date Time API (JSR-310). With the JDK8 API I would not be forced to deploy a library into the common-classloader of GlassFish, which makes deploying my application easier. Always a good thing.

Knowing that Stephen Colebourne (author of JodaTime) is also part of the spec lead team for JSR-310, I assumed there might not be too many differences between JodaTime and JSR-310.

Stepping Over

Back then I found no guide for switching, therefore I tried myself - which wasn’t any challenge anyway. But maybe this post helps other people in the same situation.

These are the steps I took to switching to JSR-310

  • comment out JodaTime dependency in my pom
  • check all syntax errors
    • use netbeans’ ‘organize imports’ feature to import the like-named classes for JSR 310
      • org.joda.time.* —–> java.time.*
    • perform following transformations
old new 
new LocalDate(year, month, day)
 
LocalDate.of(year, month, day)
 
new LocalDate()
 
LocalDate.now()
 
LocalDate.fromDateFields(javautildate)
 
LocalDate.from(javautildate.toInstant())
 
localDate.getMonthOfYear()
 
localDate.getMonthValue()
 
DateTimeFormatter.parseLocalDate("formatted date")
 
LocalDate.from(DateTimeFormatter.parse("formatted date"))
 
localdate.toString(dateTimeFormatter)
 
localDate.format(dateTimeFormatter)
 
DateTimeFormat.forPattern("pattern")
 
DateTimeFormatter.ofPattern("pattern")
 
DateTimeFormatter.print(localdate)
 
DateTimeFormatter.format(localdate)
 
"MMMMM" //(5 M) (formatting pattern for full month)
 
"MMMM" //(4 M)
  • run tests + test run ;-)
  • remove all (now) legacy references
    • Joda-Time in pom
    • Joda-Time in common cloasloader of GlassFish

The last one was tricky, but luckily I had a unit test to save me. Also note that I avoided using lambas since that is not possible out of the box with GlassFish 4.0 (though Oracle stated they will introduce Java 8 support with GlassFish 4.1 (should be out by Java One 2014)).

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