WorldTime - What Is This?
The WorldTime program is a java applet and application designed to provide you a means to display the time for locations throughout the world. The locations are customizable. You can literally modify the applet to display the time for any number of locations of your choice (including non-standard offsets from GMT). The program will also take into account any daylight saving time rules you help to define for it. Everything is controlled by an easy to edit XML file.
The program is futher customizable. Not only can you edit the cities displayed, you can also change the colors to meet your needs (using hex colors to be more friendly to the web developer).
You can also customize the format of the date and time to be verbose or succinct.
Why Would I Want This?
The web knows no boundaries. You will have visitors coming to your site from all over the world. The WorldTime program provides you a mechanism to recognize the diversity of your visitors.
Who Can Use It?
Anyone with a computer running Java can use WorldTime (just double click on the WorldTime.jar file), and anyone with a website is capable of adding the WorldTime applet to their page. There is minimal coding necessary to add the applet to your site, basically just a cut and paste.
How Does It Work?
This program gets information from your computer (the time and the time zone). With this information it is able to calculate what time it is throughout the world. A word of warning: since the initial time and time zone come from your PCs clock settings, the WorldTime program will only be as accurate as your clock.
The applet does require that your visitor's browser is capable of running java applets in order to be displayed on your web page.
Where Can I Get It?
You can download the WorldTime program right here (worldtime.zip 61k). This file is in .zip format which allows Windows users to use a utility such as WinZip to decompress it and Mac users to use the standard Stuffit Expander (if you need a decompression utility, check them out at download.com). The file includes the necessary WorldTime.jar file (the actual Java program), the necessary Java library files, an xml configuration file, and an instruction file.
When Will It Be Updated?
The WorldTime Applet is currently on version 4.0 (9 December 2004). That being said, there are currently no further updates being planned at this time unless there is a call for something. On the back burner for this applet is the ability to get its initial time via a Network Time Protocol (NTP) server. However, there are browser security issues with this (especially for users behind a firewall), so it may not happen.
