answer:Date is deprecated because it isn’t locale aware. It was replaced with the Calendar family of classes. In order to create & populate an object representing a date in Java you can do something like: Calendar c [equal] new GregorianCalendar(2008, Calendar.FEBRUARY, 19); String s [equal] DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.SHORT).format(c.getTime()); or more generally: Calendar c [equal] Calendar.getInstance(); c.set(Calendar.YEAR, 2008); c.set(Calendar.MONTH, Calendar.FEBRUARY); c.set(Calendar.DATE. 19);