This problem is not going away. We had to deal with it earlier this year with the Australians, and the U.S. is going to cause a problem or two next year as well. What's that you ask? The U.S. passed a law or two in the Energy Policy Act of 2005. Those lawmakers have to do something to earn their money. The laws affect how we observe daylight saving time (DST) beginning in 2007.

I've posted a summary of how it will affect Java developers and their applications. In short, you'll need to update your JREs so that applications understand the new DST rules. DST rules? Do we really save daylight? Well, not really, but the clock changes give us more daylight during typical waking hours. And if you don't have an updated JRE, your applications will report incorrect time.

The brief article U.S. Daylight Saving Time Changes in 2007 describes the problem and solution.