Converting a date string to a DateTime object using Joda Time library

DateTimeFormat.forPattern("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss").parseDateTime("04/02/2011 20:27:05");

I know this is an old question, but I wanted to add that, as of JodaTime 2.0, you can do this with a one-liner:

DateTime date = DateTime.parse("04/02/2011 20:27:05", 
                  DateTimeFormat.forPattern("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss"));

Use DateTimeFormat:

DateTimeFormatter formatter = DateTimeFormat.forPattern("dd/MM/yyyy HH:mm:ss");
DateTime dt = formatter.parseDateTime(string);