The DateFormat class is not thread-safe. The javadoc state that "Date formats are not synchronized. It is recommended to create separate format instances for each thread. If multiple threads access a format concurrently, it must be synchronized externally."
The following code shows how you would typically use DateFormat to convert a String to a Date in a single-threaded environment. It is more efficient to get the format as an instance variable and use it multiple times so that the system doesn't have to fetch the information about the local language and country conventions multiple times.
