Implicit json Writes and Reads for Java8 ZonedDateTime in Play 2.3.x?

Question

The new Play 2.4 has added out of the box support for json Writes and Reads for the new Java 8 time classes, but Play 2.3.x is still stuck with the Joda time json support only. Is there a way to get the Java 8 time json support on the 2.3.x? How the custom Reads and Writes for ZonedDateTime would look like?

Answer 1

You can copy the play 2.4 Writes and Reads code directly from their source code, or read it and adapt your own:

Writes:

https://github.com/playframework/playframework/blob/702e89841fc54f5603a0d981c3488ed9883561fe/framework/src/play-json/src/main/scala/play/api/libs/json/Writes.scala

Reads:

https://github.com/playframework/playframework/blob/cde65d987b6cf3c307dfab8269b87a65c5e84575/framework/src/play-json/src/main/scala/play/api/libs/json/Reads.scala

If you copy the files wholesale and remove the contravariant functor reads/writes, they will have no external dependencies beyond Java8 & Scala.

I'm obviously not advocating this kind of copy & paste in general, but I'd don't see that it would do any harm here, as it's just a stop-gap until your project migrates to play 2.4, at which point they can be deleted.