While some developers looking at dynamic languages bemoan Java's comparative verbosity, others seem busily at work bringing similar conciseness to Java code.

One example is the Apache Commons IO project, which recently released the 1.3.1 version of its Java library. Commons IO makes working with streams and files easier, often requiring just a fraction of code compared with the standard Java IO APIs. The project's documentation shows how dramatically Commons IO can reduce the amount of code required for reading from an input stream, for example:

Without commons IO:

InputStream in = new URL( "http://jakarta.apache.org").openStream();
 try {
   InputStreamReader inR = new InputStreamReader( in );
   BufferedReader buf = new BufferedReader( inR );
   String line;
   while ( ( line = buf.readLine() ) != null ) {
     System.out.println( line );
   }
 } finally {
   in.close();
 }

With Commons IO:

 InputStream in = new URL( "http://jakarta.apache.org" ).openStream();
 try {
   System.out.println( IOUtils.toString( in ) );
 } finally {
   IOUtils.closeQuietly(in);
 }

Reading lines of a file becomes similarly easy:

File file = new File("/commons/io/project.properties");
List lines = FileUtils.readLines(file, "UTF-8");

Such code is clearly on par with the sort of simplicity that dynamic languages, such as Ruby, are known for. Do you believe that APIs, such as Commons IO, can solve Java's verbosity problems in a way the language can't?

IOUtils.copy(in, System.out);