Many times you want to read contents of a file into String, but, unfortunately, it was not a trivial job in Java, at least not until JDK 1.7. In Java 8, you can read a file into String in just one line of code. Prior to the release of new File IO API, you have to write a lot of boilerplate code e.g. open an input stream, convert that input stream into a Reader, and then wrap that into a BufferedReader and so on. Of course, JDK 1.5's Scanner class did provide some breathing space but it was still not as simple as it should be, like in Python or Ruby. By using Java 7 new File API and Java 8's new features like lambda expression and Stream API, Java is now close to Python or other utility languages, when it comes to reading the file into String.