[OASIS Issue Tracker] Commented: (CAMP-33) Time zones and timestamps

[OASIS Issues Tracker <workgroup_mailer@lists.oasis-open.org>]

    [ http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CAMP-33?page=com.atlassian.jira.plugin.system.issuetabpanels:comment-tabpanel&focusedCommentId=31812#action_31812 ] 

Gilbert Pilz commented on CAMP-33:
----------------------------------

So far the discussion has seemed to center around scenarios in which the Application Admin gets information from the CAMP impl, but we need to consider the case in which the Admin PUTs information into the CAMP impl. We defined "created" as a mandatory attribute on every resource so, if you are not using 'SelectAttr' to de-select it, your PUT request MUST contain the "created" attribute. Now the "created" attribute is immutable so the value you supply on your PUT requests must be "the same" as the value currently recorded by the implementation. If we allow clients and servers to use arbitrary timezones the server-side code that enforces this constraint has to be smart enough to "know", for example, that "2012-11-27T12:18-0800" is "the same" as "2012-11-27T20:18Z". This means that, on every PUT request, you have to parse an ISO8601 timestamp and compare the actual time values. If, on the other hand, we required all timestamps to be in UTC (with the trailing 'Z'), you could check this constraint with a simple string comparison.

> Time zones and timestamps
> -------------------------
>
>                 Key: CAMP-33
>                 URL: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CAMP-33
>             Project: OASIS Cloud Application Management for Platforms (CAMP) TC
>          Issue Type: Improvement
>            Reporter: Tobias Kunze 
>            Priority: Trivial
>
> We may want to standardize on a time zone for timestamps. E.g. http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/browse/CAMP-32 shows a JSON response with a local time (-08:00):
>     {
>        "uri" : "http://slc03lgx.us.oracle.com/campSrv/Assembly/9";,
>        "name" : "/examples",
>        "description" : null,
>        "created" : "2012-11-14T08:33-0800",
>        "tags": []
>        ...
>     }
> The questions are
>     1. Should the PaaS return
>         a. Client local time
>         b. Server local time
>         c. UTC
>         d. some other time, such as the account owner's (e.g. corporate headquarters)?
>     2. Should the time zone be client-selectable?
> Use cases:
>     A. I manage two PaaS, one in Singapur, one in Ireland. I was firefighting at 4am when my pager went off and then made some more changes around 9am. I want to see all operations on my dashboard in one local time so I don't have to do mental gymnastics correlating Singapur times with Ireland.
>     B. My PaaS provider in Virginia sent me an outage notice for 6:07am - 6:23am EDT. I am in Arizona which I don't even know the time zone of. Checking the management command history, I'd prefer them to be in server local time (EDT).
>     C. My company is headquartered in Johannesburg. My PaaS provider is in Tokyo. I am on assignment in China. I do NOT want the provider to be "smart" and bombard me with corporate HQ time. I'd like to get times in China time, or at least in UTC so I can think in simple offsets.
> It seems to me that
>     * For A,
>         - 1a is preferred but requires 2
>         - 1b should never be the default
>         - 1c is acceptable since I can manage one simple addition/subtraction
>         - 1d is unacceptable
>     * For B,
>         - 1a should not be the default
>         - 1b is preferred but (from A above) requires 2
>         - 1c is acceptable, as above
>         - 1d is unacceptable
>     * For C,
>         - 1a, 1b, 1c are the same as for A
>         - 1d is unacceptable by definition

-- 
This message is automatically generated by JIRA.
-
If you think it was sent incorrectly contact one of the administrators: http://tools.oasis-open.org/issues/secure/Administrators.jspa
-
For more information on JIRA, see: http://www.atlassian.com/software/jira