What is the Best Practice for manipulating and storing dates in Java?

Question

What is the Best Practice for manipulating and storing Dates e.g. using GregorianCalendar in an enterprise java application?

Looking for feedback and I will consolidate

Answer 1

Joda is the way to go. Why ?

1. it has a much more powerful and intuitive interface than the standard Date/Time API
2. there are no threading issues with date/time formatting. java.text.SimpleDateFormat is not thread-safe (not a lot of people know this!)

At some stage the Java Date/Time API is going to be superseded (by JSR-310). I believe this is going to be based upon the work done by those behind Joda, and as such you'll be learning an API that will influence a new standard Java API.