As an aside, I went through the entire codebase last night and replaced every
try {
somthing.close()
} catch (IOException e) {
//swallow exception
}
with FileUtils.close()
So what exactly *is* the intention of this method? IMHO, if an IOException was thrown when some stream was closed, it was probably for a reason, and probably something is broken, and probably the user should find out about it - and fix it - rather than have the problem be permanently suppressed from view. Maybe an exception closing a stream is harmless, but Ant surely doesn't know this; it could mean the last few Kb did not get flushed to disk, for example. E.g. I often see in Ant code like this (roughly adopted from ChangeLogTask.writeChangelog):
OutputStream os = null;
try {
os = new FileOutputStream(...);
printStuffToStream(os);
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new BuildException(e);
} finally {
FileUtils.close(os);
}To my mind this is both harder to follow the flow of, and less robust than, the straightforward version:
try {
OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(...);
try {
printStuffToStream(os);
} finally {
os.close();
}
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new BuildException(e);
}Here it is obvious than any IOException's get reported, and that an OutputStream will always be closed if it ever got created. You don't need any special utility method, or any dummy initial null value. You can even make the local var final if that floats your boat.
When there is more than one thing to be closed - e.g. an InputStream and an OutputStream - using nested try-finally blocks makes it clearer that everything gets closed, with no "if (os != null) {....}" weirdness:
try {
InputStream is = new FileInputStream(...);
try {
OutputStream os = new FileOutputStream(...);
try {
copyStuff(is, os);
} finally {
os.close();
}
} finally {
is.close();
}
} catch (IOException e) {
throw new BuildException(e);
}Thoughts?
-J.
-- Jesse Glick <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> x22801 NetBeans, Open APIs <http://www.netbeans.org/>
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