Programmatic Encryption in Java

I'm working on a program in my spare time that requires, among other things, storing a user's password. To avoid storing the password in plain text, I dug around the internet and cobbled together code that will encrypt and decrypt the password. Here's the code:

import javax.crypto.Cipher;
import javax.crypto.SecretKeyFactory;
import javax.crypto.spec.PBEKeySpec;
import javax.crypto.spec.PBEParameterSpec;

private static final char[] password = new char[] {/*array of any number of
   random characters*/};
private static final byte[] salt = new byte[] {/*array of 8 random bytes*/};
private static final String ENCRYPTION_ALGORITHM = "PBEWithMD5AndDES";
private static final PBEKeySpec key = new PBEKeySpec(password, salt, /*random 
   number, doesn't really matter what the number is*/);

private String decrypt(String value) {
 return crypto(value, Cipher.DECRYPT_MODE);
}

private String encrypt(String value) {
 return crypto(value, Cipher.ENCRYPT_MODE);
}

private String crypto(String value, int mode) {
 String result = "ERROR";
 try {
  Cipher cipher = Cipher.getInstance(ENCRYPTION_ALGORITHM);
  cipher.init(mode, SecretKeyFactory.getInstance(
    ENCRYPTION_ALGORITHM).generateSecret(key),
    new PBEParameterSpec(key.getSalt(), 
key.getIterationCount()));
  result = new String(cipher.doFinal(value.getBytes()));
 } catch (Exception e) {
  log.info("cryption failed: " + e.getMessage());
  e.printStackTrace();
 }
 return result;
}