Serializing Date in Java

Question

I'm passing around some objects through web service and some of them contain java.sql.Date. Because Date doesn't have empty constructor it doesn't want to get serialized.

First part of a question is easy: what is the best way to pass a date between client and service?

Second part is bit trickier: Once I decide how to pass dates around, I can obviously declare date transient and make some wrapper class to pass dates as String or whatever, but how to apply same solution as transparently as possible to several classes that include Date?

(I have a hunch that DynamicProxy thingy might be a solution, but reading documentation on Sun's site wasn't very helpful, so if it really is something in that direction, some clarification would be appreciated)

Edit: I asked wrong question, sorry (some misunderstanding between me and coworker what is actually a problem). Problem occurs because of deserializing. So once I have date in xml format it tries to deserialize itself as GregorianCalendar. Other part of a question still remains: What is the best way to receive something (long timestamp or GregorianCalendar) and convert it to sql date, without making 10 different wrappers for 10 different classes. I'm using a NetBeans for code and wsdl generation.

Answer 1

Joda-Time

The Date class has a clunky API. A better implementation is Joda-Time.

ISO 8601

Joda-Time also allows you to convert your date in a ISO 8601 standard format (yyyy-mm-ddTHH:MM:SS.SSS). Using this standard when moving dates from server to its client has the advantage to include the full date in a readable format. When you use for example JAXB, the XML representation of a date is also this ISO standard. (see the XMLGregorianCalendar class)