how to convert java string to Date object

    try 
    {  
      String datestr="06/27/2007";
      DateFormat formatter; 
      Date date; 
      formatter = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy");
      date = (Date)formatter.parse(datestr);  
    } 
    catch (Exception e)
    {}

month is MM, minutes is mm..

"mm" means the "minutes" fragment of a date. For the "months" part, use "MM".

So, try to change the code to:

DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy"); 
Date startDate = df.parse(startDateString);

Edit: A DateFormat object contains a date formatting definition, not a Date object, which contains only the date without concerning about formatting. When talking about formatting, we are talking about create a String representation of a Date in a specific format. See this example:

    import java.text.DateFormat;
    import java.text.SimpleDateFormat;
    import java.util.Date;

    public class DateTest {

        public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
            String startDateString = "06/27/2007";

            // This object can interpret strings representing dates in the format MM/dd/yyyy
            DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy"); 

            // Convert from String to Date
            Date startDate = df.parse(startDateString);

            // Print the date, with the default formatting. 
            // Here, the important thing to note is that the parts of the date 
            // were correctly interpreted, such as day, month, year etc.
            System.out.println("Date, with the default formatting: " + startDate);

            // Once converted to a Date object, you can convert 
            // back to a String using any desired format.
            String startDateString1 = df.format(startDate);
            System.out.println("Date in format MM/dd/yyyy: " + startDateString1);

            // Converting to String again, using an alternative format
            DateFormat df2 = new SimpleDateFormat("dd/MM/yyyy"); 
            String startDateString2 = df2.format(startDate);
            System.out.println("Date in format dd/MM/yyyy: " + startDateString2);
        }
    }

Output:

Date, with the default formatting: Wed Jun 27 00:00:00 BRT 2007
Date in format MM/dd/yyyy: 06/27/2007
Date in format dd/MM/yyyy: 27/06/2007

You basically effectively converted your date in a string format to a date object. If you print it out at that point, you will get the standard date formatting output. In order to format it after that, you then need to convert it back to a date object with a specified format (already specified previously)

String startDateString = "06/27/2007";
DateFormat df = new SimpleDateFormat("MM/dd/yyyy"); 
Date startDate;
try {
    startDate = df.parse(startDateString);
    String newDateString = df.format(startDate);
    System.out.println(newDateString);
} catch (ParseException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
}