JDK7 vs. JDK 6 File Monitoring

One of the really nice advancements, or features of Java 7 is the WatchService. This feature takes advantage of the OS file event notification facilities where available, or otherwise uses a "primitive" polling mechanism. In my blog article WatchService Using ScheduledExecutorService Example, I show an example of how to use the WatchService along with an ExecutorService to do file monitoring. This is really easy to implement and use.

However, the question of how to do it on JDK 6 was posed to me for those who can't do an upgrade for business reasons. I did a quick Google search to see what was out there. Alas, some of the most popular search results were poor, or really badly implemented solutions. I did come across a nice piece of code done by Pascal Essiembre. I didn't find much more on the developer. I would give a link to his work if I were sure that what I found was him. Pascal wrote the code below which is EPL 1.0 so you are free to use it. I used it to check it out, and it works likely in the same manner as the "primitive" implementation in JDK7. Here is the code unmodified from the form I found. This is very nicely done. Good code lives on. I just wish this were more near the top of the search results.

Thanks Pascal for your code contribution to the Java community.