When creating a Spring Boot Rest service, you can configure Spring to convert a LocalDateTime to display as a ISO-8601 date string when returning a JSON response. To get this working you have to do a few things. Firstly, you need the following dependency: com.fasterxml.jackson.datatype:jackson-datatype-jsr310

Although Java has always been awesome, Java 8 has brought the language several features the language was in dire need of. Apart from the long-awaited improved DateTime-API and the introduction of Optionals, Java 8 finally gave behaviour the attention it deserves by incorporating (a form of) functional programming into the language using lambdas.