The old, much-derided Date and Calendar classes have always been confusing and difficult to use properly, particularly in a multi-threaded context. JodaTime has long been a popular alternative, but now an even better option is built-in. Java 8's JSR 310 implementation offers specific classes for:

Class Use for
LocalDate a date, without time of day, offset, or zone
LocalTime the time of day, without date, offset, or zone
LocalDateTime the date and time, without offset, or zone
OffsetDate a date with an offset such as +02:00, without time of day, or zone
OffsetTime the time of day with an offset such as +02:00, without date, or zone
OffsetDateTime the date and time with an offset such as +02:00, without a zone
ZonedDateTime the date and time with a time zone and offset
YearMonth a year and month
MonthDay month and day
Year/MonthOfDay/DayOfWeek/... classes for the important fields
DateTimeFields stores a map of field-value pairs which may be invalid
Calendrical access to the low-level API
Period a descriptive amount of time, such as "2 months and 3 days"

Noncompliant Code Example

Date now = new Date();  // Noncompliant
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("dd.MM.yyyy");
Calendar christmas  = Calendar.getInstance();  // Noncompliant
christmas.setTime(df.parse("25.12.2020"));

Compliant Solution

LocalDate now = LocalDate.now();  // gets calendar date. no time component
LocalTime now2 = LocalTime.now(); // gets current time. no date component
LocalDate christmas = LocalDate.of(2020,12,25);