GSON default date serializer is locale-specific

This has caused problems for Caliper, which was relying on the default date 
serializer:
http://code.google.com/p/caliper/issues/detail?id=113

Work-around the problem by registering a date type adapter like the following:

  private static class DateTypeAdapter implements JsonSerializer<Date>, JsonDeserializer<Date> {
    private final DateFormat dateFormat;

    private DateTypeAdapter() {
      dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ssz", Locale.US);
      dateFormat.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
    }

    @Override public synchronized JsonElement serialize(Date date, Type type,
        JsonSerializationContext jsonSerializationContext) {
      return new JsonPrimitive(dateFormat.format(date));
    }

    @Override public synchronized Date deserialize(JsonElement jsonElement, Type type,
        JsonDeserializationContext jsonDeserializationContext) {
      try {
        return dateFormat.parse(jsonElement.getAsString());
      } catch (ParseException e) {
        throw new JsonParseException(e);
      }
    }
  }

Original issue reported on code.google.com by limpbizkit on 30 Jan 2011 at 1:01

[markkolich]

In case anyone was wondering where UtcDateTypeAdapter.java ended up, it’s part of gson-extras:

https://github.com/google/gson/blob/d9cc7bc60b492664fe9f328d1bab9f9ae873f4d4/extras/src/main/java/com/google/gson/typeadapters/UtcDateTypeAdapter.java

[Paxa]

Worked as:

Gson gson = new GsonBuilder()
        .setPrettyPrinting()
        .setDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd'T'HH:mm:ss.SSSX")
        .setFieldNamingPolicy(FieldNamingPolicy.LOWER_CASE_WITH_UNDERSCORES)
        .create();