public abstract interface Temporal
  Comment     Returned-by     Constructor-argument     Method-argument     Field-type     Type-bound     Links  

Framework-level interface defining read-write access to a temporal object, such as a date, time, offset or some combination of these.

This is the base interface type for date, time and offset objects that are complete enough to be manipulated using plus and minus. It is implemented by those classes that can provide and manipulate information as fields or queries. See TemporalAccessor for the read-only version of this interface.

Most date and time information can be represented as a number. These are modeled using TemporalField with the number held using a long to handle large values. Year, month and day-of-month are simple examples of fields, but they also include instant and offsets. See ChronoField for the standard set of fields.

Two pieces of date/time information cannot be represented by numbers, the chronology and the time-zone. These can be accessed via queries using the static methods defined on TemporalQuery.

This interface is a framework-level interface that should not be widely used in application code. Instead, applications should create and pass around instances of concrete types, such as LocalDate. There are many reasons for this, part of which is that implementations of this interface may be in calendar systems other than ISO. See java.time.chrono.ChronoLocalDate for a fuller discussion of the issues.

When to implement

A class should implement this interface if it meets three criteria:

Four examples make this clear:

extends TemporalAccessor

Since:  1.8

@implSpec This interface places no restrictions on the mutability of implementations, however immutability is strongly recommended. All implementations must be Comparable.