The main tz project page shows various links to other time zone database formats and other tz compilers. I have been working on the Joda-Time project, which is designed as a replacement for Java's standard date and time classes. It includes a tz compiler and it has its own compact binary format for the resulting files. I would be pleased if the Joda-time project was mentioned on the tz page as well. Joda-Time project: http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/ Compiler (link is unstable): http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/api-0.95/org/joda/time/tz/ZoneInfoCompiler.... Most users will have no need to compile the files themselves, as the Joda-Time distribution includes pre-compiled tz files in the jar. The DateTimeZone class knows how to load the files and create objects for them. I finished the tz compiler and new binary format about a year ago. I would have just used Java's standard time zone class, except it did not perform fast enough. Sun's Java v1.4 has a time zone implementation that retrieves offsets using a binary search. Joda-Time's CachedDateTimeZone is faster than a binary search. Caching is handled automatically, and time zones with trivial rules are not wrapped with the cached implementation. It could not be piggybacked onto Java's standard time zone class, as it does not provide a way to iterate over offset transitions. The only documentation on the binary format and the caching is in the source code itself. One of the features in the binary format is that it stores times with variable precision and size. It can store up to millisecond precision, as a 64-bit signed integer. It stores precalculated offset transitions up to the point where a simple DST rule can fully describe all future transitions. Runtime caching is implemented by breaking the time line down into fixed size regions of 2^32 milliseconds, or about 49.7 days. Offset lookup is performed by retrieving one of these regions from the cache. The lookup is performed by shifting out the lower 32 bits of the 64-bit timestamp. This value, modulo 512, is used as an array index to retrieve the region info. A hashtable with 512 regions of 49.7 days provides collision free caching within periods of 69.7 years. The region info object contains a linked list of offset transition instants. Since most regions have less than two transitions, the linked list search is quite fast.