For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strin

For most situations, I deal with this by keeping dates as strings throughout the app, not objects. They get read from the db as strings, passed around as strings. If I need datetime calculations, I use the language's datetime objects to do it and convert right back to string. Display formatting for users happens at the last moment, in the template. No-one seems to like this style, but I find it much simpler than converting on db read/write and passing datetime objects around.