As we all know with Java comes the very complicated list of IO classes plus there is another thing called NIO.
I was wondering if there is any thumb rule that could explain the situations and best IO to use for the problem( considering Web application in mind ).
I always get confused which one to use when, another query is How should I remember the implementation of all these classes. It get confusing all the time
Difference between IO vs NIO:
+-------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| IO | NIO(New IO) |
+-------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Stream oriented | Channels/Buffers oriented |
| Thread Blocking IO(Synchronous) | Non Thread blocking IO(Asynchronous i.e notification based) |
| Read or Write can do one byte/char at a time. | Channel is bidirectional. |
| Readers are for read only, Writers are for write only | Channel can read and write byte buffer(not char buffer). |
| Buffer creates in JVM heap memory. | Buffer can be outside or in-memory of JVM. |
| Charset is limited ot UTF-8. | Charset support expanded to UTF-16 and more. |
| | "Selectors" allows a single thread to handle multiple Channel's.) |
+-------------------------------------------------------+-------------------------------------------------------------------+
java.nio (NIO stands for non-blocking I/O) API was introduced with the J2SE 1.4 (February 6, 2002)An extension to NIO that offers a new file system API, called NIO.2, was released with Java SE 7 (July 28, 2011), it includes new sub-package java.nio.file under java.nio
Blocking call: Control returns only when the call completes