How to Instantiate Joda DateTime from TimeZone String ID and Epoch

Question

I am taking a look at the Joda Time library. I am trying to figure out how to construct a DateTime object given an epoch time stamp and a timezone. I am hoping that allows me to find the day of week, how of day, etc for that epoch time, in that time zone. However I am unsure how to pass the DateTimeZone to the DateTime constructor.

import org.joda.time.DateTime;
import org.joda.time.DateTimeZone;
import org.joda.time.Instant;

public class TimeZoneTest {

    public static void main (String[] args) {

        long epoch = System.currentTimeMillis()/1000;

        DateTimeZone tz = new DateTimeZone( "America/New_York" );

        DateTime dt = new DateTime( epoch, tz );

        System.out.println( dt );
    }

}

I tried the above hardcoded example of "America/New_York", but got this from the compiler. What am I doing wrong?

$ javac -cp "joda-time-2.2.jar:." TimeZoneTest.java
    TimeZoneTest.java:12: org.joda.time.DateTimeZone is abstract; cannot be instantiated
    DateTimeZone tz = new DateTimeZone( "America/New_York" );
                      ^
    1 error

Answer 1

To get a time zone from an ID, you use DateTimeZone.forID:

DateTimeZone zone = DateTimeZone.forID("America/New_York");

As an aside, I don't think "epoch" is a good name for your variable - it's really "seconds since the Unix epoch". Additionally, I don't see why you're dividing by 1000... the relevant constructor for DateTime takes a time zone and the milliseconds since the Unix epoch... so you can pass the value returned from System.currentTimeMillis() directly.