[hibernate-dev] Date/Time Support and timezones

As I start work on supporting Java 8 Date/Time types, I wanted to get everyone's opinion on handling OffsetDateTime, OffsetTime and ZonedDateTime with regards to timezone. Each represent a date/time in a particular timezone/offset (much like a Calendar). A few options: 1) Forego OffsetDateTime, OffsetTime and ZonedDateTime support and just stick with LocalDateTime, LocalDate and LocalTime. 2) Use the timezone/offset to pass along to the driver (for proper conversion); when reading back we'd have to read back based on the default timezone. This is essentially the old strategy used in CalendarType which I never really liked because its not reflexive. 3) Break them into a tuple of the store each piece. E.g., for OffsetDateTime the Tuple is a LocalDateTime (the Timestamp) and a TZ offset. So we'd store each individually in the database and be able to rebuild them in a fully reflexive manner. 4) Handle them using UTC or GMT at the JDBC level. This is essentially the same as (2)