Comments on: Mad Cool Date Library

By: Breton

Breton — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 04:00:33 +0000

I think that hte mm/dd/yyyy problem isn’t as bad as you guys make it out to be. It might be a problem for those other parsing libraries, but you are overlooking the fact that you can reparse on EVERY KEYSTROKE and give instant feedback. When you type in a date, you know instantly what the library thinks you meant, and you can easily make corrections based on that feedback.

It might be a legitimate criticism if you had to *submit* with faith that the library undestood what you meant, wait 4 seconds for the next page to load, and find that you’ve accidentally booked for the wrong month. But this just won’t happen with instant feedback systems like this.

By: koreanplywood

koreanplywood — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 13:40:53 +0000

Nice library, but a shame that it splooges methods and properties all over the Date

By: MichaelSchoeler

MichaelSchoeler — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 19:03:11 +0000

Baaah…. It can’t even tell “My birthday” ;-)

It looks very nice, I’ll have it in mind the next time the need arise.

By: Geoffrey McGill

Geoffrey McGill — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:07:18 +0000

@okohll - We're very interested in porting the library (especially the Parser) to other Languages. Work should start on ports to Ruby and C# very shortly. Porting to Java should be trivial after the C# version is complete (or vice-versa). Feel free to bring up the topic in the Datejs Forum if you're interested in working on a Port.

By: Geoffrey McGill

Geoffrey McGill — Tue, 04 Dec 2007 00:01:11 +0000

@Eivind Eklund – The Datejs library does not include user interface components. It’s just code API. Any kind of popup message would have to be created by the developer. The library deals with ambiguous dates very elegantly, but the key is that the developer should detect the user-agent culture and serve up the appropriate culture-specific Datejs file. The library is completely oblivious of the user-agent. Just serve up the appropriate culture-specific file and there should be very few problems.
.
Another option would be to restrict user entry to only two possible formats (“dd/MM/yy” and “MM/dd/yy”), use .parseExact() instead of .parse() and then prompt the user each time to confirm which format/date they thought they were entering when either the month or day is 12 or lower. But that all seems rather goofy.

By: okohll

okohll — Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:10:18 +0000

Anything like this for Java?

By: Eivind Eklund

Eivind Eklund — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 15:55:50 +0000

@Geoffrey McGill, idea about the dd/MM/YY and MM/dd/YY problem:

In many cases, it is hard to know what culture visitors are from. One way of solving this would be to have the library be able to automatically detect ambigous dates and create a popup where people could select what date they actually meant.

This could possibly be done directly, or at least there could be an API getting a suitable set of strings/suitable information for a popup. Choice could be remembered in a cookie or available so the library user could put it in persistent storage somewhere.

By: skold

skold — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 00:08:54 +0000

What about fortnights! Even with the En-GB / En-AU l10n files there are no fortnights. I guess it shows how difficult i18n can be — there are heaps of other locale-specific concepts like “å†æ¥é€±”(JA) for “the week after next”. And do Americans say “Friday week” too, meaning “Friday next week”?

It’s fun to pick apart other people’s code huh. Glad it’s not my date library under scrutiny.

By: Jon Hartmann

Jon Hartmann — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:25:06 +0000

…wow trolls rule

By: you're an idiot

you're an idiot — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 20:18:09 +0000

Look at the PHP functions for date… they are just connecting that with AJAX… sure it’s nice to have, but it doesn’t deserve this type of hype… you asshat

By: Eric

Eric — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 18:08:45 +0000

Very impressive in thinking outside the box especially. Practical wise though – it’s the box that I and I think many appreciate and want. I want to see the big picture – I want to see the calendar. I want to see what day is the last of the month or what are the dates of each Saturday. I want something to pick from. I want to see the whole month or week. Anyway, it’s still a very cool tool.

By: John Price

John Price — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:19:46 +0000

There’s a Ruby library called Chronic (http://chronic.rubyforge.org/) that handles this same sort of thing (though not client-side, obviously). Based on the comments here, it sounds like it might have a little wider coverage in terms of what it’ll handle.

By: Fabio Lima

Fabio Lima — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:51:38 +0000

Hi,

very nice lib, loved it. Question: Is there a way to convert one format to the other?
examples:
* a search in a webservice returns a date in mdy format, and we need to show in dmy format.
* the user types a date in dmy format, and we need to use this in the search on the webservice which uses mdy.

thx

By: David

David — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:37:12 +0000

Very slick. Any chance of getting start and end dates based on an implied range?

ie “July 2008″ becomes:

{start: new Date(2008, 7, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0),
end: new Darte(2008, 8, 1, 0, 0, 0, 0)}

By: Cal Jacobson

Cal Jacobson — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 16:06:01 +0000

Nice work, Geoffrey! I’m definitely going to keep an eye on this and I look forward to future releases.

By: Dmitry

Dmitry — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 15:41:59 +0000

for JSP see an appropriate taglib here http://www.servletsuite.com/servlets/dateaddtag.htm for example

By: Jay

Jay — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:51:12 +0000

Pretty innovative! Hope they keep it up.

By: Jon Hartmann

Jon Hartmann — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:24:13 +0000

@Geoffrey McGill
Thanks for the response… like I said, the phrase doesn’t really make sense, but it does throw it for a loop. Looks like specifying a month and a year together give it problems… “tomorrow, april 2008″ yields a date in the 41st century as well.

By: Tamlyn

Tamlyn — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:21:04 +0000

@geoffrey apologies for my ill-informed comment, it was still a bit early in the morning for me and I hadn’t had my coffee! When I said “worse than useless” I was thinking of a scenario where a ‘classic’ date input field would be replaced with this free input field without specifying a format. In this situation it could easily be highly detrimental to usability. But in a web app context it makes a lot more sense once a user learns some of the input formats available (and where the app is aware of the user’s locale/’culture’).

As an open source developer myself I am aware of the frustration caused by people criticising your work without taking the time to understand it first so I really should have known better!

By: puRe

puRe — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 14:17:00 +0000

Wonderful library.
Anyone of you clicked on the eyes of the ninja in the header?