1.3 The java.io Package

The java.io package contains the classes that handle fundamental input and output operations in Java. Almost all fundamental I/O in Java is based on streams. A stream represents a flow of data, or a channel of communication, with a reading process at one end of the stream and a writing process at the other end, at least conceptually. As of Java 1.1, the java.io package is the largest of the fundamental packages. See Chapter 6, I/O, for a more in-depth description of the basic I/O capabilities provided by this package.

Java 1.0 supports only byte streams. The InputStream class is the superclass of all of the Java 1.0 byte input streams, while OutputStream is the superclass of all the byte output streams. A number of other byte stream classes extend the functionality of these basic streams. For example, the FileInputStream and FileOutputStream classes read from and write to files, respectively, while DataInputStream and DataOutputStream read and write binary representations of the primitive Java data types. The main problem with these byte streams is that they do not handle the conversion between the Unicode character set used internally by Java and other character sets used when reading or writing data.

As of Java 1.1, java.io contains classes that represent character streams. These character stream classes convert other character encodings that appear in I/O streams to and from Unicode characters. The Reader class is the superclass of all the Java 1.1 character input streams, while Writer is the superclass of all character output streams. Many of the reader and writer classes have analogous behavior to corresponding byte stream classes. For instance, FileReader and FileWriter are character streams that read from and write to files, respectively.

The InputStreamReader and OutputStreamWriter classes provide a bridge between byte streams and character streams. If you wrap an InputStreamReader around an InputStream object, the bytes in the byte stream are read and converted to characters using the character encoding scheme specified by the InputStreamReader. Likewise, you can wrap an OutputStreamWriter around any OutputStream object, which allows you to write characters and have them converted to bytes.

As of Java 1.1, java.io also contains classes to support object serialization. Object serialization is the ability to write the complete state of an object to an output stream, and then later recreate that object by reading in the serialized state from an input stream. The ObjectOutputStream and ObjectInputStream classes handle serializing and deserializing objects, respectively. These classes provide basic serialization capabilities for all objects that implement the Serializable interface. Chapter 7, Object Serialization, provides a more detailed explanation of the new object serialization functionality in Java 1.1.

The RandomAccessFile class is the only class in java.io that does not use a stream for reading or writing data. As its name implies, RandomAccessFile provides nonsequential access to a file, so you can use it to read from or write to specific locations in a file.

The File class represents a file on the local filesystem. The class provides methods to identify a file, both in terms of its path and its filename. There are also methods that retrieve information about a file, such as its status as a directory or a file, its length, and its last modification time.

See Chapter 11, The java.io Package, for complete reference material on all of the classes in the java.io package.