AutoCloseable
(introduced in Java 7) makes it possible to use the try-with-resources idiom:
public class MyResource implements AutoCloseable {
public void close() throws Exception {
System.out.println("Closing!");
}
}
Now you can say:
try (MyResource res = new MyResource()) {
// use resource here
}
and JVM will call close()
automatically for you.
Closeable
is an older interface. For some reason To preserve backward compatibility, language designers decided to create a separate one. This allows not only all Closeable
classes (like streams throwing IOException
) to be used in try-with-resources, but also allows throwing more general checked exceptions from close()
.
When in doubt, use AutoCloseable
, users of your class will be grateful.