I just spent the last hour banging my head on my desk trying to get any kind of date type (whether java.util.Date or a simple timestamp) from the current time and a timezone identifier (something along the lines of Etc/GMT+12). You’d think this is an easy task. Obviously the GregorianCalendar takes a timezone as a constructor argument, so it really should be.
It is until you’ve called getTime() on the calendar object and wonder why you’re still getting your local time. And on further inspection you realize that GregorianCalendar doesn’t even care about the timezone object you’ve just given it. Only setting it through setTimeZone() makes it recognize that you actually want it to use a different timezone for date and time calculation.
This should work now, right? Of course it should, but getTime() and getTimeMillis() still returns the local time and doesn’t mind that you don’t want it to. Only if you use a date formatter like SimpleDateFormat will Java remotely start to understand what you really want. But it stays awefully quiet about the fact that then you can’t get a simple timestamp anymore.
There’s an article on ONJava with more detail on this.
And there I thought timezone handling in Rails would be complicated.