Comments on: Java WTF: Calendar vs Date

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 18:33:03 +0000

check this out:
http://www.icu-project.org/docs/papers/international_calendars_in_java.html

By: Fabrizio Giudici

Fabrizio Giudici — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:07:46 +0000

JSR-310 is a clean up of Joda-Time that will hopefully be part of Java 7, so it would be a good idea to start using it.

I didn’t know that Date/Calendar was an IBM contribution. Do you have a reference? It would explain many things (even though I’m not saying Sun does always perfect thing, of course).

By: whaley

whaley — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:43:45 +0000

Joda-time is being used as the basis for the date/time/whatever api in jdk7. David HM Spector, you are getting your wish.

By: David HM Spector

David HM Spector — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 16:21:34 +0000

Joda-time is great, however for anything that requires a Date or Calendar object you’ll just wind up have to screw around with conversion back to Date and Calendar.

Sun needs to have a flag day at some point and just throw out both Date and Calendar. It’s one of the single worst aspects of Java programming.

By: bhaskar

bhaskar — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:42:03 +0000

If you need a decent time API in Java use joda-time. Seriously you will never go back to the JDK time API mess.

By: Asd

Asd — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 15:01:28 +0000

The Calendar code was “donated” by IBM. Accepting it was the worst decision in the history of Java.

By: Theo

Theo — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:46:17 +0000

I’m interested in hearing the Java API designers rationale on why they designed the Calendar API like this. I understand the implementation. Don’t you think it’s kind of strange the Date class before/after takes a Date object and performs as expected, while the Calendar class’s after/before takes any ol’ Object AND only operates on other Calendar objects?

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:35:57 +0000

Taken from the javadocs

“if and only if when is a Calendar instance. Otherwise, the method returns false.”

By: Gareth

Gareth — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 05:33:53 +0000

Here is the code behind Calendar.before(Object when)

public boolean before(Object when) {
return when instanceof Calendar &&
getTimeInMillis()