Question

To minimize boilerplate code, I’d like to have a Socket and ServerSocket class which both implement the Closeable interface.

I’ve seen that in Java 7, Socket and ServerSocket are likely to implement Closeable, so can’t I just do something like:

public class ClosableSocket extends Socket implements Closeable {}

and implement the needed constructors? Or are there better solutions? What I want is to use it in conjunction with Apache Commons IO IOUtil.closeQuietly(Closeable closeable).

Answer 1

I would have something like

public static void closeQuietly(Object object) {
    try {
        if (object instanceof Closeable)
            ((Closeable)object).close();
        else if (object instanceof Socket)
            ((Socket)object).close();
        else if (object instanceof ServerSocket)
            ((ServerSocket)object).close();
        else 
            // use reflections to call close() if you must.

    } catch (IOException ignored) {
        // ignored
    }
}