Time4A

Advanced Date and Time Library for Android

What is Time4A?

This project is a specialized version of Time4J-v3.x (using the branch level6 - starting with version v3.5) and distributes an AAR-library suitable for the Android platform. It is not modularized like Time4J itself, but its (single) artifact "time4j-android" replaces the Time4J-modules "core", "i18n", "calendar", "olson" and "tzdata". Hence the only Time4J-modules which might be combined with this AAR-library are just "misc" and "range" if needed. More details and links can be found in the main project under:

https://github.com/MenoData/Time4J

The main difference compared with Time4J is how all resources are organized. Time4A does not use the service loader mechanism since latter one is rather inefficient on Android. Instead Time4A uses the assets-directory to store all text resources, calendar data and last but not least the latest available timezone data. If you want you can even override the standard resources by defining your own assets using the same resource paths.

Why not use other libraries?

While libraries like ThreetenABP or Joda-Time-Android care about holding the latest timezone data independent from the Android platform they fail to hold their own i18n-resources. But real-world mobile devices using the Android platform often use very different text resources and data for world languages, dependent on how up-to-date the Android OS-version is. Furthermore, even the newest Android platform does not offer the best available quality of i18n-translations (an example is missing support for localized plural rules in formatting of durations). Time4A closes this big gap supporting actually 86 languages and has more features than any other date and time library available for the Android platform. Of course, Time4A also supports the newest timezone data available at IANA. On the other side: If you really want you can even use the platform timezone data in parallel. Time4A gives you the freedom which timezone data to use.

Any disadvantages?

Yes, Time4A is rather big in terms of method count and size (although still much smaller than ICU4J). However, you can apply Proguard to strongly shrink the size. And future versions of Time4A might be modularized allowing you to only install the parts you needed.

Usage

Only two steps are required before coding against the API of Time4A.

• First step: Insert following dependency to your build.gradle-file.

dependencies {
    compile group: 'net.time4j', name: 'time4j-android', version: '3.30-2017b'
}

• Second step: Initialize your application this way.

public class MyApplication extends Application {
    @Override
    public void onCreate() {
        super.onCreate();
        ApplicationStarter.initialize(this, true); // with prefetch on background thread
    }
}

Android-specific topics

• Time4A registers a specialized BroadcastReceiver in order to track any change to the system timezone.
• The Android version of TickProvider deploys the best available clock using android.os.SystemClock.elapsedRealtimeNanos().
• Time-specific format patterns are aware of the user-preference for 12/24-hour-format if the system locale is chosen.
• Proguard is strongly recommended to shrink the size of Time4A.

Feedback

Feedback is welcome. You can best use the issue-tracker of the main project Time4J for feedback:

https://github.com/MenoData/Time4J/issues