Time Zone Calculation

Am developing website like online travel portal. 开发者_高级运维The issue is displaying GMT time for various regions at flight booking and list out the timing. Any one gives idea to calculate and show the time for different countries?

Thanks

Although it is pretty hard to answer your question without a reference to particular technology, I will try.

End user Time Zone detection

Definitely, all time-related information should be presented both in local format and local time zone. By local I mean the one used by end user.
I am guessing that your application will not require creating user profiles. I am also assuming that flight schedules will not be visible on front page and user would need to perform search. In that case you have three choices:

• Let user specify time zone from drop down box. I have no way to show you how it should be done without referring to concrete technology. The only thing I must point out is, it should present UTC offset, time zone name and list of cities, for example: UTC+01:00 Central European Time (Paris, Berlin, Warsaw).

• You could read current time zone offset with JavaScript and send it out to server

In that case you can use following code snippet to detect offset:

var now = new Date();
var offset = now.getTimezoneOffset();

This will give you current GMT offset in minutes. The problem with that solution is, this offset might be different on the target date.

• Obviously you could as well send GMT based dates in invariant form to the browser (for example using ISO8601 format: 2011-05-25T11:07Z) and format this date on the client using JavaScript. I never heard of for example JQuery plugin which would do that correctly (respecting local formats), though. It seems that you would be forced to write your own.

Date and time formatting as well as time zone conversion

Ha, it depends on solution you want to implement as well as technology you want to use. For now, I can't write much here.