Commonwealth Games

Now as the Commonwealth Games 2006 in Melbourne, Australia are almost at the end I want to talk about what did these games bring to us in Java world.

In one word - confusion. The reason for that is two mistakes.

Let me explain. Australia as many other countries has summer time when we adjust our clocks and watches one hour ahead. For example, Sydney's time zone is 10 hours ahead of GMT (GMT+1000) and during summer time, the clock is one hour ahead, making the time zone 11 hours ahead of GMT (GMT+1100).

I followed the discussions on Australian Java Users' Group on this topic and I came to the following conclusion. The first mistake was made by Aussie goverment. They should not be allowed to change the time as they will. Who cares about... whatever. The second came soon after. Microsoft released a patch that was supposed to fix this exceptional case. Their release was a new timezone - second mistake. Yes, new timezone. And as a result all Java applications were confused as they did not know how to deal with new timezone they had no idea about. So they all defaulted to GMT.

Don't worry the fix is out there already. Sun released new updates to JDKs and JREs and advises the affected users to update them with the latest releases.

• J2SE 5.0 Update 6
• J2SE 1.4.2 Update 11
• J2SE 1.3.1 Update 18

For those of you who are still using J2SE 1.3.1, I hope it is not too late as the new release is available only after 22 March.

Read more on Australian Time Zone Changes Affect Java Applications.