Rather than use JodaTime, I think we should plan on using the new date and time API for JDK 8 (JSR-310), which has a JDK 7 backport library we can use until we move to JDK 8. The only difference will be the package name. But, we should avoid putting the backport interfaces in our public API, so that might mean using only java.util.Date or Calendar for the moment.