No, there isn't. The instanceof "spaghetti" would have to exist somewhere anyway. Make a generic method that does that:

public <T> void write(DataOutputStream stream, T object) {
   // instanceofs and writes here
}

It actually uses a two bytes to write the length of the string before using an algorithm that compacts it into one, two or three bytes per character. (See the documentation on java.io.DataOutput) It is close to UTF-8, but even though documented as being so, there are compatibility problems. If you are not terribly worried about the amount of data you will be writing, you can easily write your own by writing the length of the string first, and then the raw data of the string using the getBytes method.

// Write data
String str="foo";
byte[] data=str.getBytes("UTF-8");
out.writeInt(data.length);
out.write(data);

// Read data
int length=in.readInt();
byte[] data=new byte[length];
in.readFully(data);
String str=new String(data,"UTF-8");