The country of Samoa has decided to skip a day, the 30th of december 2011 doesn’t exist on Samoa. This decision was driven by economical reasons. I wonder, what potential problems we can run into regarding software development for our IT systems depending on timezone information?
To skip a day, it all sounds so easy. First of all i was curious to know if similar situations have occured in the past and what the software development pitfalls could be. A small investigation showed me that you need to be careful with assumptions regarding regional timezone issues. Let’s have look at how a programming language like JAVA handles these kinds of situations.
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One of the most common challenges of managing the configuration of servers in your typical DTAP environment is, in my opinion, keeping all the involved hosts at the same level of configuration in terms of installed operating system packages and their configuration files. It really can be a pain to keep all the systems at the same configuration level. Faillure to do so can lead to interesting situations where software produced by the project team does not run or perform on the acceptance and/or production environment while it was running perfectly on the development and/or test servers.
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