RC 2022 Day 12 - Javascript's Date

2022-08-23

I spent most of today continuing working on my calendar service in Kotlin and also made some changes to the front end, which involved learning a bit about Dates in Javascript.

A Javascript Date object is basically a wrapper around a number representing the milliseconds since 1 January 1970, so it holds information about a date & time.

We can see this if we initialise a new Date:

date = new Date()
date.valueOf()

outputs: 1661370033502

Date doesn't support different time zones - all Dates are in UTC. However, when converted to a string the time is converted to the user's browser time zone:

date.toString()

outputs: Wed Aug 24 2022 20:40:33 GMT+0100 (British Summer Time)

I think this is pretty neat - rendering in the user's time zone is really useful, and this seems like the exact amount of date/time & time zone functionality needed for the browser.