The Apache Foundation hopes to make IO development easier with a new version of Apache Commons IO. Dubbed version 2.0, the biggest change to this library of common IO routines is the bump in JDK requirements from 1.3 to 1.5. Elsewhere in this release are new bounded input streams, and tagged input and output streams.
With the move to JDK 1.5 brings new capabilities for Commons IO, with developers now being able to use annotations and generics, neither of which were supported in Commons IO 1.4. Additionally, new reader/writer methods to ProxyReader and ProxyWriter were added. The move to JDK 1.5 also allowed for the replacement of StringBuffer with StringBuilder where appropriate.
While version 2.0 includes a number of new features, the move to requiring JDK 1.5 caused some discussions in the Commons IO mailing list. Primarily, these came down to whether or not this version should be called Commons IO 1.5 or 2.0. In the end, it was decided that breaking compatibility with past versions and increasing the needed version of the JDK warranted an upgrade to version 2.0.
Apache Commons IO is licensed under the Apache license, and is therefore free and open-source software. It can be found here.
