April 05, 2006

proposed timezone changes for icu4j

in response to some RFEs, IBM's Yoshito Umaoka has proposed some interesting changes to ICU4J's timezone (tz) classes including methods to list tz rules as well as handle iCalendar's VTIMEZONE. to summarize from his from his email:
  • com.ibm.icu.util.ZoneRule: an abstract class representing a tz transition rule. this class represents basic properties of zone rule such as raw UTC offset and DST offset and abstract methods to access onset information.
  • com.ibm.icu.util.TimeListZoneRule: a concrete class extending ZoneRule. this class represents zone transition point(s) defined by UTC millis.
  • com.ibm.icu.util.RecurrentZoneRule: a concrete class extending ZoneRule. this class represents recurrent zone transitions defined by a rule, such as first Sunday in April. the way to define recurrent rule is pretty similar to SimpleTimeZone.
  • com.ibm.icu.util.RuleBasedTimeZone: a class extending TimeZone. this class aggregates one or more ZoneRule instances. using this class and ZoneRule instances, you can create a custom TimeZone which supports any historical zone transitions.
  • com.ibm.icu.util.VTimeZone: a class extending TimeZone, wraps either RuleBasedTimeZone or OlsonTimeZone (default TimeZone implementation used by ICU4J). this class would have two constructor methods for creating a new VTimeZone instance from 1) TZID such as "America/New_York" and 2) RFC2445 VTIMEZONE component. this class also provides some method to write out underlying zone rules into VTIMEZONE format.
in addtion to the new classes mentioned above, he also proposes some modifications to existing classes:
  • com.ibm.icu.util.TimeZone: an additional method - "List getZoneRules()", which returns a list of ZoneRule instances for the TimeZone. the implementation in TimeZone class just throws UnsupportedOperationException.
  • com.ibm.icu.util.SimpleTimeZone / com.ibm.icu.impl.OlsonTimeZone: overrides "List getZoneRules()" to return actual ZoneRule instances for these TimeZone implementation.
the javadocs for the proposed changes have been (temporarily) put up here. if you want to participate in the discussion regarding these changes hop on over to the ICU sourceforge site and subscribe to the mailing list.

jitter bug references: 4577, 5012

to me these seem like some decent improvements and i know several folks in the ColdFusion community are interested in timezones, especially their rules.

posted by Paul Hastings @ 6:45 PM

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home