Java developers

I always have problems doing dates in java.

I need to get today's date, and parse out the year for comparison to years selected from a drop down. How can I do this?

Thanks!!!!

I've been working on a Swing GUI, and after a while I considered coming up with some sort of description language that I could use to generate a GUI, but I've just come across Jelly which can do this. I expect there are others. Can anyone share experiences with anything like this?