如果你想避免解析日期，只是想要一个GMT的时间戳，你可以使用:

final Date gmt = new Timestamp(System.currentTimeMillis()
            - Calendar.getInstance().getTimeZone()
                    .getOffset(System.currentTimeMillis()));

当前UTC日期

Instant.now().toString().replaceAll("T.*", "");

这里还有一个获取GMT时间戳对象的建议:

import java.sql.Timestamp;
import java.util.Calendar;

...

private static Timestamp getGMT() {
   Calendar cal = Calendar.getInstance();
   return new Timestamp(cal.getTimeInMillis()
                       -cal.get(Calendar.ZONE_OFFSET)
                       -cal.get(Calendar.DST_OFFSET));
}

此代码打印当前UTC时间。

import java.text.ParseException;
import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
import java.util.Date;
import java.util.TimeZone;


public class Test
{
    public static void main(final String[] args) throws ParseException
    {
        final SimpleDateFormat f = new SimpleDateFormat("yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss z");
        f.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
        System.out.println(f.format(new Date()));
    }
}

结果

2013-10-26 14:37:48 UTC

这肯定会返回UTC时间:作为字符串和日期对象!

static final String DATE_FORMAT = "yyyy-MM-dd HH:mm:ss";

public static Date getUTCdatetimeAsDate() {
    // note: doesn't check for null
    return stringDateToDate(getUTCdatetimeAsString());
}

public static String getUTCdatetimeAsString() {
    final SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT);
    sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("UTC"));
    final String utcTime = sdf.format(new Date());

    return utcTime;
}

public static Date stringDateToDate(String StrDate) {
    Date dateToReturn = null;
    SimpleDateFormat dateFormat = new SimpleDateFormat(DATEFORMAT);

    try {
        dateToReturn = (Date)dateFormat.parse(StrDate);
    }
    catch (ParseException e) {
        e.printStackTrace();
    }

    return dateToReturn;
}

下面是另一种以字符串格式获取GMT时间的方法

String DATE_FORMAT = "EEE, dd MMM yyyy HH:mm:ss z" ;
final SimpleDateFormat sdf = new SimpleDateFormat(DATE_FORMAT);
sdf.setTimeZone(TimeZone.getTimeZone("GMT"));
String dateTimeString =  sdf.format(new Date());