Utility Class Fills in Java's Missing Functionality

Java programmer seems to live in two worlds. One is the object-oriented world of classes, interfaces, methods, accessibility, and more advanced notions such as patterns, refactorings, aspects, and concerns. The other world—the "real world"—is absolutely independent from the first. It consists of files, folders, copy, compare, and chmod operations. Anybody who regularly switches between Perl and Java can find Java, an otherwise versatile and beautiful language, strangely awkward by comparison. It can seem to lack Perl's elementary operations—operations that have nothing to do with an object model but are essential for down-to-earth programs that deal with the contents of our hard drives.

The Files utility in the MyJavaTools project, a site where I publish freely available, general-purpose Java tools, bundles all the methods and helper classes that Java is missing into one class. This article explores the methods this utility class offers and describes their functionality with regards to J2SE 5.0.