Incompatibility SimpleDateFormat.applyLocalizedPattern between Sun JDK versions

According to the Javadoc, the applyLocalizedPattern method on
SimpleDateFormat is supposed to take a localized date pattern and
initialize the SimpleDateFormat object with that format. This will
allow us to use that SimpleDateFormat object on a Date object to format
a date string. However, it would appear that for JDK 1.4.x, this method
no longer accepts localized pattern - i.e. in German, the localized
pattern for a date would be "tt.MM.uuuu", where the non-localized
pattern would be "dd.MM.yyyy". In 1.3.x, using that pattern works fine,
but in 1.4.x, it no longer accepts that pattern.

Reproduction Case:

I have the following test program, test2.java:

import java.text.*;
import java.util.*;

public class test2 {
  public static void main(String args[]) {
    try {
      SimpleDateFormat df = (SimpleDateFormat)
DateFormat.getDateInstance(DateFormat.DEFAULT, Locale.GERMAN);
      df.applyLocalizedPattern("tt.MM.uuuu");
      System.out.println(df.format(new Date()));
    }
    catch (Exception e) {
      e.printStackTrace();
    }
  }
}


When I use JDK 1.3.1_04 to run this program, I get :
10.02.2004

When I use JDK 1.4.2_03 to run this program, I get:
java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Illegal pattern character 't'
at
java.text.SimpleDateFormat.translatePattern(SimpleDateFormat.java:1730)
at
java.text.SimpleDateFormat.applyLocalizedPattern(SimpleDateFormat.java:1
785) at test2.main(test2.java:8)