I've given up on the native Date/Time stuff in favour for Joda Time (<a href="http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/" rel="nofollow">http://joda-time.sourceforge.net/</a>)
DATE4J is a good alternative to the standard Java Date/Time lib or even Joda Time. (<a href="http://www.date4j.net/" rel="nofollow">http://www.date4j.net/</a>)
I'm pretty sure most Java developers moved to Joda Time long ago to solve this issue. It's pretty much standard.<p>Well, maybe not enterprise developers (like me) who rarely get to use "untrusted" third party libs.
<a href="http://blog.joda.org/search?q=jsr-310" rel="nofollow">http://blog.joda.org/search?q=jsr-310</a> provides some interesting backstory to the JSR-310 / Joda Time saga...