Joda-Time provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes. At last Java 8 is coming up with completely re-designed Date and Time features. Even though we will check the features of Joda Time which provides a quality replacement for the Java date and time classes:
Courtesy: Joda.
- Easy to Use. Calendar makes accessing 'normal' dates difficult, due to the lack of simple methods. Joda-Time has straightforward field accessors such as getYear() orgetDayOfWeek().
- Easy to Extend. The JDK supports multiple calendar systems via subclasses of Calendar. This is clunky, and in practice it is very difficult to write another calendar system. Joda-Time supports multiple calendar systems via a pluggable system based on the Chronology class.
- Comprehensive Feature Set. The library is intended to provide all the functionality that is required for date-time calculations. It already provides out-of-the-box features, such as support for oddball date formats, which are difficult to replicate with the JDK.
- Up-to-date Time Zone calculations. The time zone implementation is based on the public tz database, which is updated several times a year. New Joda-Time releases incorporate all changes made to this database. Should the changes be needed earlier, manually updating the zone data is easy.
- Calendar support. The library currently provides 8 calendar systems. More will be added in the future.
- Easy interoperability. The library internally uses a millisecond instant which is identical to the JDK and similar to other common time representations. This makes interoperability easy, and Joda-Time comes with out-of-the-box JDK interoperability.
- Better Performance Characteristics. Calendar has strange performance characteristics as it recalculates fields at unexpected moments. Joda-Time does only the minimal calculation for the field that is being accessed.
- Good Test Coverage. Joda-Time has a comprehensive set of developer tests, providing assurance of the library's quality.
- Complete Documentation. There is a full User Guide which provides an overview and covers common usage scenarios. The javadoc is extremely detailed and covers the rest of the API.
- Maturity. The library has been under active development since 2002. Although it continues to be improved with the addition of new features and bug-fixes, it is a mature and reliable code base. A number of related projects are now available.
- Open Source. Joda-Time is licenced under the business friendly Apache License Version 2.0.
Courtesy: Joda.
