For a long time now the onTap framework has included features for managing timezones, something for which ColdFusion's support is traditionally somewhat weak. But timezones are a messy issue and notorious for creating unexpected challenges in software development. For example, it's generally considered a best practice to store dates in UTC (formerly GMT) timezone because that time zone is neutral, having no offest and no daylight savings adjustments, meaning that 5-o-clock is 5-o-clock is 5-o-clock. Really what this means is that it's a good baseline from which times for other timezones can be extrapolated.
That's actually the intention of UTC in the first place and why it is that many platforms like ColdFusion and SQL Server have native functions for getting the current time in UTC or converting times to and from UTC. SQL Server has a GetUTCDate() function for example although I'm not aware that it has any native functions for converting to or from. So the onTap framework by default will assume that you want to store dates in UTC and when you enter dates into forms, if you've added a time, it will convert that date/time value to UTC before it's stored. If there's no time, it leaves the date alone.
(Of course if you don't like the fact that the framework handles this time-zone converting for you and you'd rather do it all yourself, you can disable it by setting the timezone for the request to UTC. If there's no offset and no DST adjustment for the current timezone, then it will only be adding or subtracting zeros from your dates, effectively canceling out the feature.)
A while back I implemented a feature in the SQL Abstraction tools that allows you to use "now" as an alias for the current time in UTC when performing inserts or updates. I did that because I was finding that I wanted to insert the current UTC time frequently (you might say routinely) and at the time it was a bit of a challenge because the tools' default behaviors were converting the date from the current timezone of the request (which belongs either to the user or to the server). So in order to get the "now" UTC I was having to first convert the UTC date to the local time zone so that it would be the current time in UTC when it was converted back. So the fix that made it much easier to handle that common task was allowing me to assign it via "now", i.e. myobject.update(SomeDateColumn="now"). That's pseudocode -- the real thing is a bit more involved but you get the idea.
I was just noticing a similar issue with the forms this evening. It wasn't quite as simple as I would like to create a date input in a form with a default value of the current time (or date). So I decided to fix that by adding a feature to the input validator that will interpret values of "now" or "today" as the current date, with or without the time respectively. So in my case, the input element is
And that gives the input element a default value of today's date plus time. If everything is working properly, it should match the clock in my system tray. :) It's important that the input be validated as a date, otherwise the framework doesn't even try any date massaging. They also get massaged a second time when you use the framework tools to validate the form on the server side, so it's important also make sure you are performing the server-side validation unless you're doing your own date massaging. On the other hand if you use tap:dbtable in your form to automate validation for the form based on your database metadata, then you won't need to include the tap:validate attribute you see in this snippet since the automation will add that for you.
Part of the upshot of this is that if javascript is disabled in their browser, users might be able to type "now" or "today" into the form to get those values. (If they have javascript enabled, the default javascript validation will stop them, although if you really like the idea of using "now" and "today" in forms, you can change the regular expression the framework uses for javascript validation.
Oddly, while I was in there adding this, I noticed also that the localization directories were being included in the wrong order... So /_application/l10n/en/us/100_dateformat.cfm that overwrites the date format for the united states to be mm/dd/yyyy was being included before instead of after /_application/100_i18n.cfm where the default format of dd/mm/yyyy for the rest of the world is set. Basically it wasn't using US date formatting in the US. So I fixed that. It seems odd that I hadn't seen that earlier, since I know it was working before. Anyway it's fixed now (and for most folks wouldn't have been a deal-breaker anyway, since most of us in the US could just set the value application-wide to use US dates).
p.s. I updated the zip archive as usual.