Using the NIO System

Using the NIO System

This section illustrates how to apply the NIO system to a variety of tasks. Before beginning, it is important to emphasize that with the release of JDK 7, the NIO subsystem was greatly expanded. As a result, its uses have also been greatly expanded. As mentioned, the enhanced version is sometimes referred to as NIO.2. Because the features added by NIO.2 are so substantial, they have changed the way that much NIO-based code is written and have increased the types of tasks to which NIO can be applied. Because of its importance, most of the remaining discussion and examples in this chapter utilize NIO.2 features and, therefore, require JDK 7, JDK 8, or later. However, at the end of the chapter is a brief description of pre-JDK 7 code. This will be of aid to those programmers working in pre-JDK 7 environments or maintaining older code.

In the past, the primary purpose of NIO was channel-based I/O, and this is still a very important use. However, you can now use NIO for stream-based I/O and for performing file-system operations. As a result, the discussion of using NIO is divided into three parts:

      Using NIO for channel-based I/O

      Using NIO for stream-based I/O

      Using NIO for path and file system operations

Because the most common I/O device is the disk file, the rest of this chapter uses disk files in the examples. Because all file channel operations are byte-based, the type of buffers that we will be using are of type ByteBuffer.

Before you can open a file for access via the NIO system, you must obtain a Path that describes the file. One way to do this is to call the Paths.get( ) factory method, which was described earlier. The form of get( ) used in the examples is shown here:

static Path get(String pathname, String ... parts)

Recall that the path can be specified in two ways. It can be passed in pieces, with the first part passed in pathname and the subsequent elements specified by the parts varargs

parameter. Alternatively, the entire path can be specified in pathname and parts is not used. This is the approach used by the examples.