nio classes

[Roedy Green]

I would like to write an entry for the Java glossary on the nio
classes. I have no experience with them.

I'd like to give an overview of what they are for, when to use them,
when not, the major gotchas.

Any thoughts on what I should say?

 

[Thomas G. Marshall]

I would like to write an entry for the Java glossary on the nio
classes. I have no experience with them.

I'd like to give an overview of what they are for, when to use them,
when not, the major gotchas.

Any thoughts on what I should say?

They can be used in place of anything else in java.io, and /should/ be for
that matter.

Most of the java.io classes were designed around the Decorator pattern.
Building a protocol stack of sorts: various layers adding to what you need
for io.

In addition to being very cumbersome to write, (java.io /was/ a little
fingertip unfriendly), this is a very inefficient mechanism for io. In
contrast, nio is an optimized non-decorator approach. You have buffers at
the bottom level. You hand buffers off to "channels" which represent the
i/o connections.

You'll find that nio has found itsway into other packages as well, so that
things such as socket i/o can be managed with channels.