2007 US Daylight Savings change time zone support in JDK 1.3

Sun has supported the 2007 US Daylight Savings change in recent versions of its JDKs 1.4 and 1.5. It has made partial Daylight Savings changes to JDK 1.3, but it's not a complete implementation like in 1.4 and 1.5, because there is no support for past/future Daylight Savings rules, only a single current set of Daylight Savings rules per time zone.

Our Java application (running in the America/New_York time zone) seems to be doomed, because the likelihood of upgrading to JDK 1.4/1.5 seems slim (we have to upgrade a third-party product first and success is seeming more and more remote), and Sun claims to be unable to fully implement the Daylight Savings change in JDK 1.3.

If any Sun Java staff can explain the reasons for being unable to implement the change in 1.3 (or at least some kind of workaround that an individual JVM user could enable), please fill me in. Any pointers on cleanly setting up a custom workaround would be valuable too.

If there are other Java users in the same situation, please fill me in on your own plans if you can. Is anybody trying to pressure Sun or other vendors for a solution? Is anybody writing their own custom workaround?

More details....

What we really need is for the default TimeZone in JDK 1.3 (America/New_York on our machines) to work regardless of whether the date/time being checked is pre-2007 or post-2007. In particular, getOffset and inDaylightTime should work for both 2006 dates and 2007 dates. The JDK should return the correct values for 2006 dates, as well as the correct values for the 2007 US DST extension dates (03/12/2007-04/02/2007 and 10/29/2007-11/05/2007). This would enable parsing and formatting using SimpleDateFormat to work correctly as well. The TimeZone and SimpleDateFormat APIs are used throughout our application.

JDK 1.3.1_19 has an interesting workaround that depends on the current system time. Prior to Jan 1 2007, it will handle 2006 dates correctly but 2007 dates wrong. After Jan 1 2007, it will handle 2007 dates correctly but 2006 dates wrong. Either way, it is always wrong for some dates.

JDK 1.4.2_13 and 1.5.0_09 both handle 2006 and 2007 dates correctly.

If JDK 1.3 will never work for 2006 and 2007 dates, then I am contemplating two workarounds:

1. Set the default TimeZone to a custom implementation as soon after JVM startup as possible.

2. Avoid the default TimeZone entirely, changing our application code to rely on explicit custom TimeZones.

Prior related Java Forum topics:

* http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=31&threadID=645874 (Java Essentials - Java Programming) winds up referencing the JDK 1.4 patch as a solution, and there is some discussion about how future/historic dates affect applications

* http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=481&threadID=735038 (Deploying - Java Upgrade) just talks about 1.4 and 1.5 patches

* http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=481&threadID=717268 (Deploying - Java Upgrade) also just talks about 1.4 and 1.5 patches

* http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?forumID=37&threadID=703214 (Specifications - Java Virtual Machine (JVM)) also just talks about 1.4 and 1.5

Related Sun Java Bug Database bugs:

* http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6471271 reports the same issue with 1.3.1_19 that I am seeing and the reporter makes the same clarification, that past/future dates don't work at all still. Sun seems to indicate that it will not fix this in 1.3.1, and the 1.3.1_19 "hack" is it for 1.3.1.

* http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=6391777 refers to updates in 1.3.1_18 to address Australia DST changes, and also indicates that past/future dates (or "historic" dates) won't work at all. It gives a little more rationale behind the difficulty of implementing this for 1.3.1.

* http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4257314 refers to the fixes in 1.4 to support historic DST dates.

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2007 US Daylight Savings change time zone support in JDK 1.3

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