Launch Thyme
Posted on in WebDate is DateTime
Timezones and programming rarely mix well, particularly on the client-side web.
When building a traditional server-rendered site, it’s common for the server to be in one timezone, making it a dependable source of truth. JavaScript takes it’s time from the users' device, which, when combined with a single-page/serverless architecture, can result in some unexpected outcomes.
Prefix: I’m in the UK, and it’s British Summer Time right now.
Take the following: new Date('2018-05-10').toString(). What do you reckon will be returned? A natural conclusion would be something like: Thu May 10 2018 or Thu May 10 2018 00:00:00, but alas not. The result is: Thu May 10 2018 01:00:00 GMT+0100 (BST).
That’s interesting, but not that bad, right? What’s an hour between friends. Let’s notch it up a bit and set our device system time to be in New York, USA. Same code: new Date('2018-05-10').toString(), very different result:
Wed May 09 2018 20:00:00 GMT-0400 (EDT)
We ‘lost’ a day…
Even though we explicitly gave the Date object a date, it treated it more like a DateTime, bringing timezones into play. It makes handling dates unreliable, which is never a good trait in programming. What we want is a Date object that diregards time entirely…
Introducing Thyme
Thyme was built out of a need to handle dates, but not times, and certainly not timezones.
From a coding perspective, it’s pretty similar to the Date object: pass it a date and run methods on it.
const a = new Thyme('2018-05-01')
Useful methods
Equality
a.equals(b) can be used to compare two Thyme objects, or two dates: new Thyme('2018-10-02').equals('2018-10-02').
Date Ranges
const range = a.till(b) returns an array of Thyme objects between two dates. There’s also a handy range.contains(c) method.
Date methods
The date-like getFullYear, getMonth, getDate, and getDay are all available.
Alterations
add() or remove() changes the day for each Thyme object. They default to 1 day each, but accept an alternative numerical argument.
Formatting
There’s no complex formatting functionality, just a single format() method that returns a simple string: 4 October 2018
Casting
toString() will return the date in YYYY-MM-DD format. This’ll also happen when the object is stringified (toJson) or compared against (valueOf).
All the methods are detailed in the repo.
This is still a work in progress, so please file bugs/pull requests :)
Posted on in Web