I found this weird error at my production server, an error which somehow never show up at my testing environment.

java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date: "Thu Oct 11 00:00:00 ICT 2012"
        at java.text.DateFormat.parse(DateFormat.java:337)
        at DateClass.main(DateClass.java:7)

It seems that my application is unable to parse the string i provided. But, what makes me confuse is, i try with the same class on my laptop over and over again but this error is never show up. I tought it has something to do with the server’s JDK version or even the server’s operating system.

This is my java class that i use for testing purpose, it runs very well on both my laptop and development server, but it shows error on my server.

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;

public class DateClass {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String date = "Thu Oct 11 00:00:00 ICT 2012";
        Date tanggalku = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy").parse(date);
        System.out.println(tanggalku);
    }
}

After spend several minutes googling, i found out that it happen because of Java’s Date Localization. This is my workaround,

import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.Locale;

public class DateClass {
    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String date = "Thu Oct 11 00:00:00 ICT 2012";
        Date tanggalku = new SimpleDateFormat("EEE MMM dd HH:mm:ss zzz yyyy", Locale.US).parse(date);
        System.out.println(tanggalku);
    }
}

Another workaround, if you are using Apache Tomcat, is adding this configuration on your Tomcat’s server parameter.

-Duser.language=en 
-Duser.region=US

Hope it helps others 😉