Files and Streams11-30-2004Opening DiscussionDo you have any questions about the quiz?What did we talk about last class?Do you have any questions about the assignment?MotivationOne of the most important things we do on computers is store and access large collections of data. Typically this is done with files.File access comes in two flavors, random and sequential. Files of the latter type are often called streams. In a stream the basic operation is to get or put the next byte of data, though more elaborate wrappers can be put around that.java.io PackageThe normal way of doing I/O in Java is with the classes in the java.io package.This package has an elaborate class hierarchy with different classes that play the different roles for almost everything you want to do.There are also some special classes that perform specific tasks like the RandomAccessFile class.InputStreams and OutputStreamsThe most basic classes in java.io are the InputStream and OutputStream classes. These are the base classes for dealing with streams of bytes.Let’s look in the documentation to see the methods of these classes. The most significant ones are the read and write methods though the others can be important for different tasks.Streams vs. Readers/WritersThe stream classes handle reading and writing bytes. For text data it can be easier to read and write character data. This functionality is provided by the Reader and Writer classes.If you are dealing with raw data you typically use InputStream and OutputStream. If you are dealing with text data you will likely us a Reader or Writer.Plentiful SubclassesAll of these classes have multiple subclasses to give you more specific abilities. We can look at these in the docs.File versions for I/O with files.Piped versions for connecting different streams.Buffered streams for better speed.Data and object streams we will discuss next class.Basic Text Input?One thing that you might notice is missing is the ability to do basic text input. We can do text output with a PrintWriter, but there is no equivalent for input in Java.This design decision was based on the idea that programs rarely need to do general text file reading. BufferedReader allows reading lines of text that can be parsed.Binary FilesMost of the time, the way that we want to store real data in files is in binary format. For everything but strings, this takes a lot less space than storing string equivalents and is faster to read and write.With a binary file, we can write ints, doubles, and other primitives as well as strings. The files won’t be human editable, but we can write code to read them back in.Making Streams from StreamsOne of the keys to being able to use the java.io library is to notice that many stream types have constructors that you pass other streams to.These create new streams that have different functionality and use the stream that is passed to them to send the data. In effect, you are wrapping one stream inside another to get different functionality for the same source/dest.Data I/O StreamsTo do basic binary I/O in Java we use the DataInputStream and DataOutputStream classes. These can’t exist “on their own”. We use them to wrap another stream that actually goes somewhere.These classes provide us with the functionality to read and write basic types.Let’s look at these classes real quick.Object StreamsWe can write pretty much any class out to a stream by writing one component at a time, but doing so can be painful. Sometimes we want to be able to write an object as a single entity.In Java we can do this with ObjectInputStream and ObjectOutputStream.This is something that most languages don’t support.SerializationWriting objects to streams is also called serializing them. The object streams can only work with two types of data: primitives and Serializable. For an object to be serialized it must be Serializable and all its members must be either primitives or Serializable.Members that are declared transient are not serialized.More on SerializationSerialization is an incredibly powerful tool. When combined with reflection in Java it lets us do things that aren’t possible in most languages.“With great power comes great responsibility.” This is true in comics and in programming. You have seen some of the difficulties of using serialization and there are many more.•The File ClassOne other helper class in java.io is the File class. This class represents a specific file and allows us to get information about files. It is written in a way to be largely platform independent.This class also gives us the basic functionality that we would like to have when interacting with files.JFileChooserFor programs that use files, it is often nice to bring up a GUI component to let the user pick a file. This can be quite a pain. Java makes it easy by providing a class that automatically views and selects files.By simply creating and “showing” one of these, we can very easily have the user specify a file for our program to work with.CodeLet’s write a simple little text editor program that uses a GUI and allows us to edit text files.We will also use some File objects even though we could avoid them.If we have time, let's also try to make it so that we can save our drawings and load them back in by making the drawing Serializable.Minute EssayWhy is inheritance used so much in the java.io package? How might having it work that way help you in your programming?Remember that design #7 is due
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