I'm using the REST api with Crafter CMS, and the dates are formatted in a US locale specific format like: m/d/y h:m:s
This is really surprising and I hope there is a good reason for it, but more importantly, can I change it globally so it uses a standard ISO format that is locale independent? Is it using the default Java locale, the system locale, or is it just hardwired that way? Right now I am parsing it and reformatting it, but I would rather not have to do that everywhere a date is used, and I'm afraid if it runs on another machine, the format might change to whatever the locale is there which would break everything.
Crafter CMS does not depend on the system locale to format dates, it will always use the same format in the UTC timezone. Currently the format is MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm:ss
There is an open ticket to change it to ISO: https://github.com/craftercms/craftercms/issues/1415
Meanwhile, you can update the Groovy REST scripts in the Headless Blueprint to do the conversion for you so you don't have to do it in your application.