Client's Time Zone Determination

Determining a client's time zone is crucial for time-sensitive applications. This question explores how to obtain this information in the Zend Framework.

Retrieving Time Zone as Seconds Offset

The preferred method for obtaining the time zone is as a delta in seconds from UTC. For instance, Moscow, Russia would return 36060 while London, UK would return 0.

Proposed Solution

The proposed solution involves utilizing jQuery and PHP. JavaScript retrieves the local time and forwards it to the PHP backend.

Implementation Details

1. PHP Server-side:

   • Create a session to store the time zone.
   • Include jQuery in the header.

2. HTML/JS Client-side:

   • Use jQuery to retrieve the local time and time zone offset.
   • Send an AJAX request to a PHP endpoint with this information.

3. PHP Endpoi script (timezone.php):

   • Start a session and save the received time zone offset as a session variable.

Benefits of this Approach:

• Cross-platform compatibility.
• Compatibility with Zend Framework.
• Provides the time zone offset in seconds, meeting the preferred format.