Calendar function with DateFormat

Question

Hello,
I am trying to make a program that will use the time to tell me how much time I have until certain events that I enter. I use JCreator and I'm using the BreezySwing class for my GUI stuff since that's really the only GUI class I'm familiar with. After a few hours of poking around trying to get a feel for how the 2 classes work together by digging around in the documentation, I finally came up with a simple line to just tell the time. Basically it displays the time into a text area with Calendar.VARIABLE variables (i.e. DAY,HOUR,SECOND, etc.).
It kind of worked the first time, but the problem is that it got a Calendar instance the first time I ran it, and then it still is continuing to use that same instance every time I run it and no matter how I tweak it. I tried putting:
Calendar.getInstance() and putting that into a variable and using Format to format that variable but it still doesn't change the time at all. So I was thinking maybe it cached something and was using that, so I rebooted. No change. I shut down for the night and now again it is still the same.
Any ideas?

Answer 1

This may help you.
import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import javax.swing.JOptionPane;
public class CalculateDay {
    public static void print_date(String s)
        System.out.println(s);
    public static void print_date()
        System.out.println();
    public static void doDate()
              /*CURRENT DATE & TIME*/
        print_date("Current Date/Time:");
        print_date();
        Date now=new Date();
        print_date("  - : "+now);
             /*Calculate DAY*/     
        print_date();
        print_date("PARSE STRING TO DATE");
        print_date();
        Date   newDate;
        String inputDate = JOptionPane.showInputDialog("Enter input as\n yyyy-MM-dd format");
        SimpleDateFormat formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd");
        System.out.print(" - : " + inputDate + " parses as ");
        try {
            newDate = formatter.parse(inputDate);
            print_date(newDate + ".");
        } catch (ParseException e) {
            print_date("Unparseable using " + formatter + ".");
        print_date();
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        doDate();
        System.exit(0);
}