Could someone please advise the current "best practice" around Date and Calendar types.
When writing new code, is it best to always favour Calendar over Date, or are there circumstances where Date is the more appropriate datatype?
Date is a simpler class and is mainly there for backward compatibility reasons. If you need to set particular dates or do date arithmetic, use a Calendar. Calendars also handle localization. The previous date manipulation functions of Date have since been deprecated.
Personally I tend to use either time in milliseconds as a long (or Long, as appropriate) or Calendar when there is a choice.
Both Date and Calendar are mutable, which tends to present issues when using either in an API.