Introduction
Overview
Streams
Wrappers,Buffers
Console I/O
  Text Output 
     Demo 1
  Formatter/printf()
     Demo 2
  Tex 2t Input
     Demo 3
  Scanner
     Demo 4
File Class
  File I/O
  File Output-Text
     Demo 5
  Formatter to File
     Demo 6
  File Input - Text
    Demo 7
  Scanner - Files
     Demo 8
  File I/O - Binary
     Demo 9   Demo 10
File Chooser Dialog
  Demo 11
Character Codes
  Demo 12   Demo13
Object I/O
Types to Bytes
Stream Filters
Other I/O Topics
Exercises

    Supplements
Character I/O
  Demo 1   Demo 2
Random Access
  Demo 3
ZIP/GZIP Streams
  Demo 4
Piped Streams
  Demo 5
NIO Framework
More NIO
  Demo 6

The Java I/O framework uses wrapper classes to build specialized I/O streams. Conceptually the aim is to provide great flexibility and modularity by wrapping streams with classes that provide particular capabilities as needed.

Typically an instance of a lower level class is created and then it is wrapped inside more specialized stream instances by passing it to the wrapper via a constructor argument. The following code segment gives a couple of examples:

Here we first wrap an 8-bit character stream, System.in, with a 16-bit character Reader class. This provides for efficienct input of non-ASCII characters.

Buffered classes improve the performance of I/O by providing intermediate data storage buffers. The data must fill the buffer to a certain level before it is sent to the next stage, thus performing fewer time-consuming operations. Note that this can require the "flushing" of data near the end of the transmission when the data did not reach the level required for release.

In the above example, we wrap the InputStreamReader with a BufferedReader, which not only buffers the data but also provides some useful methods such as readLine(). With this method the input text from the command line returns as a string rather than one character at a time as in the lower level console classes.

Note: this use of the term wrapper has nothing to do with the numerical wrapper classes, which wrap primitive type values, but follow the same pattern of adding capabilities to an object.

Latest update: Nov. 10, 2004

              Tech
Histogram I/O
Hist I/O - Get/Set
  Demo 1
Hist I/O - Objects
  Demo 2
HistogramStream
  Demo 3
Filtering Data
  Demo 4
Exercises

           Physics
Physics Model
Simulation Design
Physics Simulator
  Demo 1
Experiment Design
Experiment Sim.
  Demo 2
Analysis
Expt. + Analysis
  Demo 3
Exercises