I'm creating a program which requires millisecond precision. It maps realtime global events, so I also need that time in UTC/GMT time. I created some bloated class which converted my system time into UTC (but I had to manually input my timezone - and this program will eventually be running on the web so that's not workable) with milliseconds from millis() minus the milliseconds after a second change that the program started... blah blah ... its basically crap...

...so long story short, how can I use java's date format/simple date format/calendar/whatever? I read some stuff about parts of it being outdated, plus I don't understand some of the terminology. Does anyone know how to just simply query the current UTC time with millisecond precision?

Thanks for your help!