Java to calculate the current GMT date

Im not sure about this but could it be related to daylight savings time?

How was you checking the differences?

Sun have a tz updater tool. I don't really know if that would help or not though http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/java/javase/tzupdater-readme-136440.html

Date today = new Date();
         SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy HH:mm");
         long offset = TimeZone.getDefault().getRawOffset();
         Timestamp time =  new Timestamp(today.getTime() - offset);
         long currentMillis = time.getTime();

         System.out.println(today.toString());
         System.out.println(time.toString());
         System.out.println(currentMillis);
         System.out.println(System.currentTimeMillis());

         SimpleDateFormat sdf1 = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd,yyyy HH:mm");
         Date resultdate1 = new Date(currentMillis);
         System.out.println(sdf1.format(resultdate1));

         SimpleDateFormat sdf2 = new SimpleDateFormat("MMM dd,yyyy HH:mm");
         Date resultdate2 = new Date(currentMillis);
         System.out.println(sdf1.format(resultdate2));

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I've had to do this myself....

TimeZone timeZone = TimeZone.getTimeZone( "GMT" );

SimpleDateFormat gmtSeconds = new SimpleDateFormat( "yyyy/MM/dd HH:mm:ss z" );
gmtSeconds.setCalendar( Calendar.getInstance( timeZone ) );

String gmtDate = gmtSeconds.format( date );

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Ps-  you can, of course, season the format string in line 3 to be whatever you want.

Bleah.  I misread your question as a "how do I get this in GMT format..."

The problem with your original solution is that you're using offsets.  The reason one would use GMT time is because it's universal, and you don't need to worry about offsets (which change, and are influenced by things like daylight time, leap time, etc).

My code above will convert any date into GMT.  Then you can do a simple string compare...  You may want to adjust the format in SimpleDateFormat to include millis.  Refer to the javadocs for SimpleDateFormat.

Thanks for the possible solutions.  I need to subtract the two dates (one being current GMT and one being in the past) after converting the date to milliseconds.  I'm guessing I have to convert the date to long data types?  Basically, I need to see what the difference is between the two dates in milliseconds.

http://helpdesk.objects.com.au/java/how-to-calculate-the-difference-between-two-dates-or-times