Lost in dates and timezones

Posted by Sebastien on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by Sebastien
Published on 2010-06-04T23:52:32Z Indexed on 2010/06/05 8:42 UTC
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I'm working on an application that stores conferences with their start and end date. Up until now, I was developing in Belgium and my server is in France, so everything is in the same timezone, no problem. But today, I'm in San Francisco, my server is in France and I noticed I have a bug.

I'm setting dates from a Flex client (ActionScript automatically adapts date display according to client local timezone, which is GMT-8 for me today. My server runs on Hibernate and MySQL in France (GMT+1). So when I look at my database using phpMyAdmin, I see a date set to "2010-06-07 00:00:01" but in my Flex client it displays "2010-06-06 15:00:01".

Ultimately, what I want is that the dates are displayed in the local timezone of the event, which is the date I set it to. So when I'm in Belgium and I set the start date of an event to be "2010-06-07 00:00:01" I want to retrieve it that way.

But I'm lost as to what layer adapts what. Is timezone stored in DATETIME MySQL columns (I can't see it in MySQL)? Does Hibernate to anything to it when it transfers it to java.lang.Date that has Timezone information? And ultimately, what is the best way to solve this mess?

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