Energy Policy Act of 2005 and its effect on your J2EE applications

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 is a statute which was passed by the United States Congress on July 29, 2005 and signed into law on August 8, 2005.

Among the provisions is one item that concerns our applications - Extending the Daylight Saving Time by approximately four weeks.

The bill amends the Uniform Time Act of 1966 by changing the start and end dates of daylight saving time starting in 2007. Clocks will be set ahead one hour on the second Sunday of March instead of the current first Sunday of April. Clocks will be set back one hour on the first Sunday in November, rather than the last Sunday of October.

How does it affect us ?

All applications and servers which are based on US Timezones are pre-programmed to take into account the day light savings. Now with the new changes coming in, any applications which make use of the day light savings, need to be patched to take care of the changes.

Vendors have started releasing patches to take care of the same.

WebSphere Portal
Lotus Domino
Windows OS

Sun has also released information and some of the older JDK versions need to be upgraded to take into effect the new DST timings. Check out the details here.