You need to deal with dates in a form other than the Gregorian Calendar used in the western world.

Visit the IBM alphaWorks web site.

As of Java 2, the only non-abstract Calendar subclass is the GregorianCalendar, as mentioned previously. However, others do exist. Check out the IBM alphaWorks web site (http://alphaworks.ibm.com), which has a large collection of freely available Java software (mostly without source code, alas). Search for “calendar”, and you’ll find a set of calendars -- Hebrew, Islamic, Buddhist, Japanese, and even an Astronomical Calendar class -- that covers most of the rest of the world.

These work in a similar fashion to the standard GregorianCalendar class, but have constants for month names and other information relevant to each particular calendar.