java: have epoch time, print how long ago in hours/days/weeks time happened

Question

I want to print "1h" or "1d" or "1y" , ideally all my possible strings only take 3 characters ie "11h" or "11y"

All my objects have an epoch time and I convert that to a Calendar object

    Calendar calendar = new GregorianCalendar(Locale.getDefault());
    Date trialTime = new Date(time*1000);
    calendar.setTime(mTime);

But now I need to know how long ago that time was from now.

 long currentTime = System.currentTimeMillis();

If I get the different of the current time and the passed in time, then I'll just be stuck with a low epoch number, if I convert that to calendar object then I'll just have an arbitrarily old year.

My next hunch is to take that difference and determine how long of a time that is, does this use the date or datetime or calendar object for assistance?

any insight appreciated

Answer 1

Joda-Time has the smarts that you need.

If you take the delta time in tics between your object times you can use Duration to get number of hours, days, etc.