Java and JavaScript Datetime Fun

So dealing with Datetime between client and server side can always be fun due to timezones but adding a number of browsers makes it all the more complicated. For our project we are using Joda-Time on the Java side and a mix of technologies on the client side (I will be addressing that soon). So we deiced to pass all datetimes via ISO-8601 the problem came when dealing with the different browsers. IE7 and IE8 both output a string that doesn’t have the milliseconds where Chrome and FireFox did.

On the Java side we used ISODateTimeFormat.dateTime() to parse the incoming date string so we wanted the milliseconds.

To make this work I made a quick JavaScript utility that I can use to output the correct format in UTC time as we wanted. You can see the code below.

Its rather simple just using the UTC versions of getting the date and time elements I construct a string that will be ISO-8601 formatted. I have tested this in IE 7, 8, and 9 Chrome and FireFox. If there are any issues feel free to comment and I will do what I can to help.