Common Date-Time Operations In Java - Formatting and Parsing Date-Time

In Date and Time With Java, a general overview of date/time related API was given. This post walks through formatting and Parsing Date-Time in Java.

Parsing and Formatting Date and Time.

What is the difference between December, 04, 1984 and 12/04/1984, and 04/Dec/1984 and ... or difference between 13:00hr and 1PM and...

Formating. They all represent the same date and time but are formatted differently.

Formatting date/time values as string, and parsing date/time values expressed in string into objects, are one of the common tasks when dealing with date/time. 

Formatting allows you to take a Java object that represents date or time and convert it into a string represention using a predefined formatting.

Conversely, with parsing, you take date or time values expressed as strings and have it converted it into valid Java date or time objects.

We quickly go over how to accomplish these tasks:

Date And Time With Java

How do you deal with dates and time in Java and perform common operations like finding difference between two dates or translate dates into a particular string formats?

This post seeks to provide an answer to those questions.

I would start off by giving a brief description of the available date related classes and packages you might encounter on the Java platform and then do follow up posts exploring some of the common date/time operations like how to format date-time, dealing with time zones and locale, finding differences between dates/times etc.

Hooking Into Container and Bean Life Cycle in Spring.

"What is the difference between BeanFactoryPostProcessor and BeanPostProcesser" This, said one of my colleagues, was part of his interview question, a question to which he promptly replied: "I don't know".

Once you pass the stage of actually getting Spring to work, passing the configuration huddle, in no time, the next couple of things you would probably run into would involve using or hooking into the various life-cycles in Spring and you start seeing things like BeanFactoryPostProcessor, BeanPostProcessor, DisposableBean, InitialzingBean, PostConstruct etc, which all seems to be callbacks mechanism that enables you plug in, somehow, into all the magic going on in Spring.

...And probably just like me, it all starts feeling like too much to grasp...Also, sooner or later, you run into the *Aware sets of interfaces too...

Dang! What are all these, How do they fit into the picture? I just want to write a web application, why do I have to grapple with all these what not?

I initially had all these concepts swirling all about without having any concrete mental model to attach them to or a good understanding of what actually is going on. I knew about the @PostConstruct annotation and maybe what it does, I also have come across various *Post Processors and maybe the IntializingBean interface a couple of times, but actually grokking and understanding where they fit did not happen until after spending some time working with other parts of Spring which allowed for a broader view of what is going, helping create some sort of mental model.