Presents your  
JAVA E-NEWSLETTER for September 25, 2003 
 
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SETTING THE TIME ZONE FOR YOUR JAVA APPLICATION   
  
Your application's time zone is usually determined by the machine's time
zone on which the app is running. Sometimes, however, you may need to 
override the time zone the application thinks it's in.   
  
To change the time zone for a particular application without changing 
the machine's time zone, set the system property user.timezone to the time 
zone that you want your program to run in. You can set this system 
property when you start the virtual machine by passing a command line 
parameter:   
  
java -Duser.timezone=UTC TimeZoneTip   
  
The class below creates a Date object and prints it to standard out:   
  
public class TimeZoneTip {   
    public static void main(String args[]) {   
        System.out.println(new java.util.Date());   
    }   
}   
  
When the program is run without the user.timezone property set, the 
output is:   
  
Sun Jun 28 19:38:27 EDT 2003   
  
In this case, the time zone defaulted to the time zone of the machine 
the program was running on: Eastern Daylight Time (EDT).   
  
When the program is run with the user.timezone property set to 
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), the output is:   
  
Sun Jun 28 23:39:59 UTC 2003   
  
When you need an application to run in a particular time zone, the 
solution is just a switch away. There are other system properties that can 
affect your application's environment. Check out the tool documentation
for the Java virtual machine to find out more.   
  
David Petersheim is a Senior Java Developer with Genscape, Inc. He 
designs and develops server-side applications to acquire and process
real-time energy data.   

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