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Comment by beachwood23 | Hacker News Reader

If Java Date was so broken before this, what have businesses been using the past few years? The article mentioned Joda-Date, but I'm curious if companies have used other solutions, or even built in-house solutions.

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The joda libraries are the de-facto standard. I have seen custom solutions but usually those are for lower than millisecond resolution.

Actually it looks like Java 8 will improve on Joda-Time, its far from perfect.

For most applications we build, if time is relevant for more than just incidental functionality, we will typically use Joda-Time. For simply incidental functionality (e.g., a few UI elements displaying the time), we'll use the standard API.

I've not seen any home-brew date APIs outside of a few bite-size pieces of functionality. For instance, we have one custom utility that takes two times and a granularity level to render a human-readable rendering such as "2 hours, 13 minutes ago."

A lot of people still use the built in Java stuff, they just don't enjoy it. Especially since a lot of code predates the existence of alternatives.

Most people use the Jodatime library. JSR-310 is an extension of Stephen Colebourne's work on that library.

Obviously there are some people who use java.util.Date, but it is a real pain in the neck to use and is very commonly complained about.

The ICU Java libraries, though annoying to use, provide interoperability with ICU C libraries. ICU has the only correct implementation of time zone support for C that I have found. Though it's been a while since I researched the issue, I think ICU did something with time zones better than Joda Time, also.

We use a mix of the built-in java dates and joda, depending on how old the code is.

We have our own time library for some domain specific time code, which internally uses joda to handle dates.

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