Problem with the time zone

Question

I live in Australia, but my hole family lives in Venezuela, I want to know how I can create an event using iCalendar but using the time support from Venezuela, without changing my time zone, for example when someone is on his birthday I want to receive an alert when it's 9 a.m in Venezuela not i Australia .. Thanks guys!

Answer 1

I think you are all missing the point. java.util.Date objects always alway always store the date as the number of milliseconds since 1/1/1970 UTC so the only TimeZone they have its the implicit UTC. When you use the Date.toString() method the toString() method gets the default time zone from your environment and formats the data accordingly. This means that the same Date object will, by default, produce a different result for France and Australia and the US.
So, if you have the date "12/5/2009" as a String then to convert it to a java.util.Date you must specify what TimeZone is implied. If it is your system time zone then you can just create a SimpleDateFormat object with the correct format and then use the parse() method to create the java.util.Date object and this will automatically be converted to UTC. If the date String represents some other time zone then you must explicitly set the time zone of the SimpleDateFormat object before parsing the string.
The same approach applies when converting a java.util.Date object to a String. If you want anything other than your system time zone then you must explicitly tell the SimpleDateFormat what time zone you want the result formatted for.