(date/time) Support `jackson-datatype-Threetenbp` fork?

[cowtowncoder]

(move from https://github.com/FasterXML/jackson-datatype-jsr310/issues/90 by @cbornet)

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The threetenbp fork doesn't seem very lively and hasn't been updated since jackson 2.6.4. Could FasterXML provide its own threetenbp implementation or maintain this one ? I understand this is a lot of work but threetenbp is now the recommended date lib for apps that can't upgrade to JDK8 (eg. android) so it would be great to have official support.

[cbornet]

@cbornet more the merrier and I would not be against support, but right now limitation is time. So I could definitely help, and take of releasing new versions as part of standard release process. But I would need help with transition. Do you know authors jackson-datatype-threetenbdp to contact.

AFAIK the maintainer is @joschi

[cowtowncoder]

@cbornet Ah. That's lucky... he's active contributor here too. :)

[joschi]

I mainly neglected the updates of jackson-datatype-threetenbp for two reasons:

• It doesn't seem to have many users (4 stars on GitHub, 2,000 downloads from Maven Central)
• It's a bit cumbersome to port all jackson-datatype-jsr310 patches to the codebase (because of different package names, different imports etc.).

This being said, if there's interest in having support for ThreeTenBP in Jackson, I can invest some time updating the project.

[cbornet]

Well, it seems people are used to joda and don't know much about threetenbp so there is a bit of promotion to do. But to do that, we need to have libraries and tools for threetenbp at the same level than joda. For instance, I've made a PR in swagger-codegen to use jackson-datatype-threetenbp the default library for jackson based languages so your download count should increase hopefully :smile: You also now have 5 stars !

[cbornet]

Also people probably don't trust a fork too much and an official "FasterXML" module would be more popular I think.

[cowtowncoder]

I think this could be useful, but thinking about challenges I guess the biggest challenges would be keeping it in-sync with the main module. Codebase is rather big for an extension module, so ideally there would be a way that minimizes code duplication.

[joschi]

I've synced jackson-datatype-threetenbp with version 2.8.4 of jackson-datatype-jsr310 (closing joschi/jackson-datatype-threetenbp#8).

I'm willing to move the project under the FasterXML umbrella, though I share @cowtowncoder's thoughts about keeping the two projects in-sync. Since the APIs of java.time and ThreeTen are pretty stable nowadays, there shouldn't be too many changes to the modules, though.

[cowtowncoder]

I don't think this will happen -- while it's a useful module, it seems to be well-maintained and "just works". Not much benefit from moving here.