Computers are useless. They can only give you
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers. Pablo Picasso This blog is about advanced input/output on the Java platform, specifically I/O using the Java 2 Standard Edition (J2SE) Software Development Kit (SDK), Version 1.4 and later. The 1.4 release of J2SE, code-named Merlin, contains significant new I/O capabilities that we’ll explore in detail. These new I/O features are primarily collected in the java.nio package (and its subpackages) and have been dubbed New I/O (NIO). In this book, you’ll see how to put these exciting new features to work to greatly improve the I/O efficiency of your Java applications. Java has found its true home among Enterprise Applications (a slippery term if ever there was one), but until the 1.4 release of the J2SE SDK, Java has been at a disadvantage relative to natively compiled languages in the area of I/O. This weakness stems from Java’s greatest strength: Write Once, Run Anywhere. The need for the illusion of a virtual machine, the JVM, means that compromises must be made to make all JVM deployment platforms look the same when running Java bytecode. This need for commonality across operating-system platforms has resulted, to some extent, in a least-common-denominator approach. Nowhere have these compromises been more sorely felt than in the arena of I/O. While Java possesses a rich set of I/O classes, they have until now concentrated on providing common capabilities, often at a high level of abstraction, across all operating systems. These I/O classes have primarily been stream-oriented, often invoking methods on several layers of objects to handle individual bytes or characters. This object-oriented approach, composing behaviors by plugging I/O objects together, offers tremendous flexibility but can be a performance killer when large amounts of data must be handled. Efficiency is the goal of I/O, and efficient I/O often doesn’t map well to objects. Efficient I/O usually means that you must take the shortest path from Point A to Point B. Complexity destroys performance when doing high-volume I/O. The traditional I/O abstractions of the Java platform have served well and are appropriate for a wide range of uses. But these classes do not scale well when moving large amounts of data, nor do they provide some common I/O functionality widely available on most operating systems today. These features such as file locking, nonblocking I/O, readiness selection, and memory mapping are essential for scalability and may be 4
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