Java try/catch/finally best practices while acquiring/closing resources

Question

While working on a school project, I wrote the following code:

FileOutputStream fos;
ObjectOutputStream oos;
try {
    fos = new FileOutputStream(file);
             


        

Answer 1

Unfortunately there is no language level support. But there are lot of libraries out there that makes this simple. Check commons-io library. Or modern google-guava @ http://guava-libraries.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javadoc/index.html

Answer 2

You're doing it right. It bothers the crap out of me too. You should initialize those streams to null explicitly - it's common convention. All you can do is join the club and want for using.