Joda-Time 2.0 gets up to Date

Stephen Colebourne has released Joda-Time 2.0, a Java library which can replace the Java date and time classes. Joda-Time was developed to fix the problems caused by the bad design and numerous bugs in Java's Date and Calendar classes. Joda-Time has been in development since 2002 and Joda-Time 2.0 is not, writes Colebourne in a blog posting, a major re-write despite the version number change, but an evolution of the 1.x codebase.

There are, though, incompatibilities with the previous version which justified changing the version number. Upgrade notes cover the incompatibilities such as the removal of some, but not all, deprecated methods and changes in timezone mapping. Joda-Time 2.0 has moved to JDK 1.5 compatibility and among the enhancements are new YearMonth and MonthDay classes, improved LocalDate/LocalTime parsing, a reliable "withStartOfDay()" method and more DateTime and Duration constructors. Details of the enhancements are also included in the upgrade notes.

Colebourne says that the release of Joda-Time 2.0 does not affect his other effort to create a new Java standard time library as JSR310 and the reference implementation project ThreeTen. He says the 2.0 release was "necessary to finally release a lot of bugs and enhancements in Joda-Time". Joda-Time 2.0 is licensed under the Apache Licence 2.0 and is available to download from the project's Sourceforge site.

(djwm)