One of the major technical improvement of OBM-2.2 is the management of the user timezone. Timezone... there is a lot of technical issue behind this simple word, for example with mysql, wich doesn't support timezone on datetime field (timestamp datatype support it thought, but doesn't handle 64 bits timestamp).
One of the main issue is... Javascript!
The javascript Date object doesn't handle timezone... well that's not true, a Date object is initialize with the browser timezone. It's not possible to change the Date timezone but it is possible to handle utc date. The Date object give you also a getOffset function... so all is good... or not.
First thing, a simple usage case :
My calendar only work with my local timezone... let's take a quite complicate one : Europe/Paris.
var timestamp = -1861920561000 // 1911-01-01 00:00:00 in france
var date = new Date(timestamp);
alert(date); /Sun Jan 01 1911 00:50:39 GMT+0100 (CET)
Well in fact in 1911 Europe/Paris timezone was +00:09:21, but javascript seems to only handle the DST of +/- 1hour twice by year. So event the local timezone is buggy.
So for a javascript calendar handeling a remote timezone, it's quite impossible to use the Date object.
The only way we found is to make our javascript parser for the
Olson database binary files and then make an custom object Date. A javascript is not the best language to make a binary parser, so we've done the parser in Java, and then compiled javascript with the GWT toolkit.
The source of the custom Date object and the Olson binary parser will come with the source of the 2.2, so if you have trouble with timezone take a look into the ressources/js/date.js and /ressource/js/bin of OBM.
