Depending on what you mean by "difference between dates" you have to be careful. For example, if you start with the difference in two dates long timestamps, you may be missing the distinction between two longs timestamps that occur 10 hours apart on the same day and two long timestamps that occur 10 hours apart on consecutive days. And I haven't even mentioned dealing with leap years!
To find durations in days, I start with two calendar objects (in the same time zone!) and roll them both back to midnight, then extract long time stamps and go from there. To calculate age in years, I extract the year, month and day from the calendar objects and take it from there.
If you work with dates you may want to check out
joda time.