<p>I find it curious that the most obvious way to create <code>Date</code> objects in Java has been deprecated and appears to have been "substituted" with a not so obvious to use lenient calendar.</p>

<p>How do you check that a date, given as a combination of day, month, and year, is a valid date?</p>

<p>For instance, 2008-02-31 (as in yyyy-mm-dd) would be an invalid date.</p>

The current way is to use the calendar class.  It has the
setLenient
method that will validate the date and throw and exception if it is out of range as in your example.
Forgot to add:
If you get a calendar instance and set the time using your date, this is how you get the validation.
```
```
Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
cal.setLenient(false);
cal.setTime(yourDate);
try {
    cal.getTime();
}
catch (Exception e) {
  System.out.println("Invalid date");
}
```
```