RESTful Java Web Services - Third Edition

Representing date and time in RESTful web resources

Here is a list of recommendations when you have the date (and time) fields in the RESTful web API resources:

• ISO 8601 is the International Standard for the representation of dates and times. It is recommended to use the ISO-8601 format for representing the date and time in your RESTful web APIs. Here is an example for the ISO-8601 date and time: YYYY-MM-DDThh:mm:ss.sTZD (for example, 2015-06-16T11:20:30.45+01:00).
• The API that you build must be capable of accepting any time zone set by the client.
• While storing the date and time fields present in the resource representation in the database, use Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). UTC is guaranteed to be consistent.
• While retuning the date ...