Timed events across time zones

I have an application design question to ask.

Say you have a server running in the Pacific time zone, and your app
allows users to schedule emails to be sent to them based on their local
time zone. So for instance, an e-mail schedule to be sent at 6 PM
Eastern time would have to run on the server at 3 PM it’s time, and if a
user in central scheduled for the same time relative to them their task
would also run at 3 PM pacific.

My approach to the problem was to have a task running every hour that
checks for scheduled events in it’s time zone and then just iterates
across the other time zones, collecting events and then e-mailing. This
seems like a pretty straight forward way to do it, but I was wondering
if anyone can recommend a more optimal approach.

Thanks,

Binh

On 19 Apr 2008, at 10:33, Binh Ly wrote:

task
would also run at 3 PM pacific.

My approach to the problem was to have a task running every hour that
checks for scheduled events in it’s time zone and then just iterates
across the other time zones, collecting events and then e-mailing.
This
seems like a pretty straight forward way to do it, but I was wondering
if anyone can recommend a more optimal approach.

Have everything in the database be utc. Only your ui bothers with
timezones, nothing else needs to know about them.

Fred