biz
A Ruby gem for performing time calculations based on configurable business hours, holidays, and breaks.
What is biz?
Biz is a Ruby library for performing time calculations based on configurable business hours. It solves the problem of accurately computing deadlines, durations, and availability while accounting for holidays, breaks, shifts, and time zones. Developers use it to model real-world operational schedules in applications like customer support systems, project management tools, and service level agreement trackers.
Ruby developers building applications that require business-aware time calculations, such as customer service platforms, ticketing systems, or any software that needs to respect working hours and closures.
Biz offers a robust, dependency-free solution with second-level precision and comprehensive feature support (holidays, breaks, shifts, DST handling), making it more reliable and configurable than simpler alternatives for complex scheduling needs.
Overview
Time calculations using business hours.
Use Cases
Best For
- Calculating SLA deadlines in customer support software
- Modeling business hours for global teams across time zones
- Scheduling deliveries or appointments within operating hours
- Tracking project timelines that exclude weekends and holidays
- Building availability calendars for services or resources
- Intersecting multiple schedules to find common working times
Not Ideal For
- Projects with simple, static 9-to-5 Monday-Friday schedules that don't need holiday or break support
- Non-Ruby applications or teams preferring integrated scheduling in other languages or frameworks
- Dynamic environments where business hours change frequently, making manual configuration updates cumbersome
- Use cases requiring only basic date arithmetic without second-level precision or DST handling
Pros & Cons
Pros
Provides exact calculations down to the second for business time, including support for breaks and shifts, as demonstrated in usage examples like 'Biz.time(30, :minutes).before'.
Allows configuration of multiple intervals per day, full-day coverage, time zones, holidays, breaks, and shifts, enabling accurate representation of complex real-world schedules.
Avoids dependencies like ActiveSupport, reducing bloat and compatibility issues, as stated in the anti-features section of the README.
Designed to be safe in multi-threaded environments, with recommendations for global variable use in threaded apps, making it suitable for scalable applications.
Cons
Setting up hours, shifts, breaks, and holidays requires detailed, manual configuration in Ruby hashes, which can be tedious and error-prone for large or dynamic schedules.
The README admits that day calculations are inherently ambiguous and may not satisfy all use cases out of the box, potentially requiring custom logic for specific needs.
For schedules with many holidays, the README recommends pre-filtering to improve performance, indicating scalability concerns with large datasets.
Frequently Asked Questions
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