I am wondering whats the proper way of creating Dates in Java? It appears the simnplest way 

```
new Date(year, month, day, hours, mins) 

```

Is depreciated. So how should I create Dates. I understand the recommended way is to use long but whats an easy way to get the long value of a human readable date like "2012-03-21 2:00PM" (or something similar)?