title: Comparing date strings with actual dates in Scala
body: <p>I'm looking for a nice way to validate and then compare a date string passed from a REST service.</p>
  
  <p>If I get 2012-12-25 (year-month-day) passed as a string, what would be an elegant way to confirm it's a valid date, and then to say that the date is in the future or in the past?</p>
  
  <p>To work with dates in Scala, one can obviously use existing Java libraries. But, working with dates in Java has always been like serving the dark side, so I don't want to drag too much of that legacy into my current coding style. Looking at the <a href="http://langref.org/scala/dates" rel="noreferrer">Scala Dates example on langref.org</a>, it feels that I'll be back to coding Java if I follow this style of programming.</p>