Saturday, March 26, 2011

Java Formatters Best Practices

Java API has set of classes for formatting and parsing dates and numbers. Mostly used are: java.text.DateFormat and java.text.NumberFormat. Often when interviewing candidates I ask them whether JDK date and number formatters are thread-safe. Surprisingly most of them don’t know the right answer, hence I decided to describe common pitfalls with formatters usage.