Streams

A large part of what network programs do is simple input and output: moving bytes from one system to another. Bytes are bytes; to a large extent, reading data a server sends you is not all that different from reading a file. Sending text to a client is not that different from writing a file. However, input and output (I/O) in Java is organized differently than it is in most other languages, such as Fortran, C, and C++. Consequently, we'll take a few pages to summarize Java's unique approach to I/O. I/O in Java is built on streams. Input streams read data; output streams write data. Different stream classes, like java.io.FileInputStream and sun.net.TelnetOutputStream, read and write particular sources of data. However, all output streams have the same basic methods to write data and all input streams use the same basic methods to read data. After a stream is created, you can often ignore the details of exactly what it is you're reading or writing. Filter streams can be chained to either an input stream or an output stream. Filters can modify the data as it's read or written-for instance, by encrypting or compressing it-or they can simply provide additional methods for converting the data that's read or written into other formats. For instance, the java.io.DataOutputStream class provides a method that converts an int to four bytes and writes those bytes onto its underlying output stream. Readers and writers can be chained to input and output streams to allow programs to read and write text (that is, characters) rather than bytes. Used properly, readers and writers can handle a wide variety of character encodings, including multibyte character sets such as SJIS and UTF-8. Streams are synchronous; that is, when a program (really, a thread) asks a stream to read or write a piece of data, it waits for the data to be read or written before it does anything else. Java 1.4 and later also support non-blocking I/O using channels and buffers. Non-blocking I/O is a little more complicated, but much faster in some high-volume apps, such as web servers. Normally, the basic stream model is all you need and all you should use for clients. Since channels and buffers depend on streams, we'll start with streams and clients and later discuss non-blocking I/O for use with servers in .