I am joining the choir recommending that you skip the now long outdated classes Date, Calendar, SimpleDateFormat and friends. In particular I would warn against using the deprecated methods and constructors of the Date class, like the Date(String) constructor you used. They were deprecated because they don’t work reliably across time zones, so don’t use them. And yes, most of the constructors and methods of that class are deprecated.
While at the time you asked the question, Joda-Time was (from all I know) a clearly better alternative, time has moved on again. Today Joda-Time is a largely finished project, and its developers recommend you use java.time, the modern Java date and time API, instead. I will show you how.
ZonedDateTime localTime = ZonedDateTime.now(ZoneId.systemDefault());
// Convert Local Time to UTC
OffsetDateTime gmtTime
= localTime.toOffsetDateTime().withOffsetSameInstant(ZoneOffset.UTC);
System.out.println("Local:" + localTime.toString()
+ " --> UTC time:" + gmtTime.toString());
// Reverse Convert UTC Time to Local time
localTime = gmtTime.atZoneSameInstant(ZoneId.systemDefault());
System.out.println("Local Time " + localTime.toString());
For starters, note that not only is the code only half as long as yours, it is also clearer to read.
On my computer the code prints:
Local:2017-09-02T07:25:46.211+02:00[Europe/Berlin] --> UTC time:2017-09-02T05:25:46.211Z
Local Time 2017-09-02T07:25:46.211+02:00[Europe/Berlin]
I left out the milliseconds from the epoch. You can always get them from System.currentTimeMillis(); as in your question, and they are independent of time zone, so I didn’t find them intersting here.
I hesitatingly kept your variable name localTime. I think it’s a good name. The modern API has a class called LocalTime, so using that name, only not capitalized, for an object that hasn’t got type LocalTime might confuse some (a LocalTime doesn’t hold time zone information, which we need to keep here to be able to make the right conversion; it also only holds the time-of-day, not the date).
Your conversion from local time to UTC was incorrect and impossible
The outdated Date class doesn’t hold any time zone information (you may say that internally it always uses UTC), so there is no such thing as converting a Date from one time zone to another. When I just ran your code on my computer, the first line it printed, was:
Local:Sat Sep 02 07:25:45 CEST 2017,1504329945967 --> UTC time:Sat Sep 02 05:25:45 CEST 2017-1504322745000
07:25:45 CEST is correct, of course. The correct UTC time would have been 05:25:45 UTC, but it says CEST again, which is incorrect.
Now you will never need the Date class again, :-) but if you were ever going to, the must-read would be All about java.util.Date on Jon Skeet’s coding blog.
Question: Can I use the modern API with my Java version?
If using at least Java 6, you can.