A simple duration method

I have often been frustrated that the Java standard library does not do a good job with time durations. Sure, there are plenty of classes and methods to deal with time and date but nothing that is meant to use a when you have a delta between two timestamps.

So I wrote a very simple method to simply print how long of a duration a number of milliseconds is. It only goes to hours so if your duration is longer than that there will be many hours. Additionally, this requires Java 5 and above.

import java.io.ByteArrayOutputStream;
import java.io.PrintWriter;

public class Duration
{
    public static void main( String[] argv )
    {
        Duration duration = new Duration();

System.out.println( "duration is " + duration.printDuration( 3601001, true ) );
    }

private String printDuration( long milliseconds, boolean longFormat )
    {
        long hours = milliseconds / ((long)(1000 * 60 * 60));
        long minutes = (milliseconds % (1000 * 60 * 60)) / ((long)(1000 * 60 ));
        long seconds = (milliseconds % (1000 * 60 * 60) % (1000 * 60)) / (long)1000;
        long millisecondsRemainder = milliseconds % (long)1000;

ByteArrayOutputStream baos = new ByteArrayOutputStream();

PrintWriter writer = new PrintWriter( baos );

if( longFormat )
             writer.printf( "%1$d hour%2$s %3$d minute%4$s %5$d second%6$s and %7$d millisecond%8$s",
                            hours, (hours == 1 ? "" : "s" ),
                            minutes, (minutes == 1 ? "" : "s"),
                            seconds, (seconds == 1 ? "" : "s"),
                            millisecondsRemainder, (millisecondsRemainder == 1 ? "" : "s" ) );
        else
            writer.printf( "%1$02d:%2$02d:%3$02d.%4$03d", hours, minutes, seconds, millisecondsRemainder );

writer.close();

return( baos.toString() );
    }
}