When people call YYYYDDD a Julian Date

I've a developer and quite often I have clients asking for a date in Julian date format, and normally this is followed with 'you know the day number format'. What they are really after is a thing called an Ordinal Date which is all explained here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_8601#Ordinal_dates. If every person is told that its not a Julian date but an ordinal date, and we no long have the confusion, the trees will suddenly be greener and all cars will run on a thing called Crukshuka that is so environmentally friendly it will make the trees grow faster!

If I ask a developer to put in some code to do a Julian date, I will either get a huge method copied from the internet, or some very odd and obscure code that will convert a date. But there is an easier way!

JodaDate to the rescue

Joda is a fantastic date and time library. It contains everything a person would ever need for date/time manipulation and formatting. How easy is it to output an ordinal date?

 import org.joda.time.LocalDate;  
 import org.joda.time.format.ISODateTimeFormat;  

...
 public String getDateYYYYDDD() {  
   return LocalDate.now().toString(ISODateTimeFormat.basicOrdinalDate());  
 }  

And thats it. All done and in one line of code (well 3 really).