From my perspective, Java types seem equally janky, and having python types but not truly supporting them (as evidenced by the serialization in gateway comms that is apparently required for a lot of consistent scripting) is the most painful middle ground.
Half of the draw of Ignition is its advertised capability to script in Python (my preferred language, and the language used for almost all of the supporting software we have), and the more I use it the more I am frustrated by it. I don't know how much of it is jython, I don't know how much of it is the implementation in the gateway backend, but also I don't want to have to care.
Also, see this topic (not just for Perspective):
Thank you, it provides some context. I suppose what I have to do, but was hoping I didn't have to do, is write my own ISO 8601 parser in ignition. Its reinventing the wheel for the upteenth time. I already tried to transit my timestamps in ISO 8601 format, but the system.date.parse method (which I am already using, out of necessity) doesn't seem to happily take the T that goes between the date and time. I do know that this was made optional in ISO 8601-2019, but it should still be handled.
@Kevin.Herron If anything is to be taken from my venting -- please fast-lane basic ISO 8601-1:2019 and extended ISO 8601-2:2019 methods for parsing datetime strings. I see other requests for this in the forums.