How to maintain a unique timezone across web application

Question

I have requirement in my enterprise web application to maintain a unique time zone (say EST). All the timestamp what we display and store in database should be in EST only. I am using Spring MVC/Hibernate for my web application. Is there any best practices or suggestion how to implement this feature? Any suggestions or guidance would be of great help.

Answer 1

My suggestion is to set the timezone in the initialization script which creates the java process using the argument -Duser.timezone=NAME where NAME you can find in the list below:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_tz_database_time_zones

Note1: Unfortunately, the developer can create some objects like Calendar using a different TimeZone. For those cases you can use Java Security Polices (it will be hard to setup for a application server). But I think just configuring that is pretty enough.

Note2 : By default the JVM collects the timezone from the user environment.