Countdown application for java

iam a newbie in java and i have a task at hand to make a simple application in java for countdown.

like for ex in that application if i enter the current date it should display how much time is left for christmas or a newyear or any religious occassion ...............

and it should display the result in the format like years/months/days/hours/minut开发者_如何学Goes and seconds........

plz help me for how to go with this...............

thanks in advance.

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First start with a hello world tutorial. After that move on joda time library since it's much more usable than the standard Java time/date/calendar. If you need further help do not hesitate to post a question here.

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How to go?

Let the user input the date, Calculate the difference from the inputted date to the occasions-dates and output them

The dates of the occassions you can put in a properties file that you read on launching the application

See Formatting dates for formatting

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The task is pretty straightforward. You need solutions for the steps

1. Capture user input (Scanner class, includes presenting a message to the user
2. Convert user input to a Date (includes rejecting invalid data)
3. Calculate the 'distance' to another date (like christmas)
4. Print the result (convert the Date distance to a readable message)

1., 2. and 4. can be done in the main method, for 3. I'd implement a separate method. like private static Date getDistance(Date earlier, Date later)