Is the HTTP header Last-Modified always in GMT?

I needed to parse the HTTP header Last-Modified to a Java Date. When I tried to parse the value of the header “Mon, 02 Jun 2008 15:30:42 GMT” it threw an exception java.text.ParseException: Unparseable date. After playing around with the code a bit I figured out I needed to add TimeZone and Locale to get the value to parse correctly. Continue reading