• A program opens a stream to a "data sink" where all the data reside.
• A file is an example of a data sink.
• A program opens a stream to allow data to be read into the routine or to be written "as data out to the file"

  

Types of Data

• Character : stored with in a file with a suffix of Reader or Writer.
• Raw Data : is saved to a data sink as bytes.
• Formatted data : an image file is stored as formatted data.
• Compressed Data

• I/O Streams
• Byte Streams: carries integer values of the data added as an input. (1), ranging a value 0-255 and 32 being a blank or space between two data during serialization. All byte stream classes are the descendents of  InputStream and OutputStream (Read More). Java uses byte streams to perform input and output of 8-bit bytes. These classes are abstract classes, therefore can't be stream directly.
  • FileInputStream in = null;
  • FileOutputStream out = null;
    •  I/O byte streams, FileInputStream and FileOutputStream.
• Character Streams: Any kind of text data handled by this stream. All character stream classes are descended from Reader and Writer.(Read More)
  • FileReader inputStream = null;
  • FileWriter outputStream = null;
• Buffered Streams: the efficiency of the streams mentioned above, further  enhanced with Buffered stream.
  • There are four buffered stream classes used to wrap FileReader or Writer streams:
    •  Create buffered byte streams:
      • BufferedInputStream and BufferedOutputStream
    • Create buffered character streams
      •  BufferedReader and BufferedWriter.
• Scanning and Formatting
  • Scanning
  • Formatting
• I/O from the Command Line
• Data Streams: support binary I/O of primitive data type values like boolean, char, byte, short, int, long, float, double and Strings. All data streams implement either the two interfaces namely DataInput  or the DataOutput interface. This section focuses on the most widely-used implementations of these interfaces, DataInputStream and DataOutputStream.
• Object Stream
• File I/O
  File Objects
  Random Access Files
  The New I/O Packages

Each invocation of one of an InputStreamReader's read() methods may cause one or more bytes to be read from the underlying byte-input stream. To enable the efficient conversion of bytes to characters, more bytes may be read ahead from the underlying stream than are necessary to satisfy the current read operation.

For top efficiency, consider wrapping an InputStreamReader within a BufferedReader. For example:

 BufferedReader in
   = new BufferedReader(new InputStreamReader(System.in));

Types of Data Sinks: :

Data sink streams read from or write to specialized data sinks such as strings, files, or pipes. Typically, for each reader or input stream intended to read from a specific kind of input source, java.io contains a parallel writer or output stream that can create it. The following table gives java.io's data sink streams.

Sink Type	Character Streams Classes	Byte Streams Classes	DataSink Classes
Memory	CharArrayReader, CharArrayWriter	ByteArrayInputStream, ByteArrayOutputStream	ByteArrayInputStream, ByteArrayOutputStream
	StringReader, StringWriter	StringBufferInputStream
Pipe	PipedReader, PipedWriter	PipedInputStream, PipedOutputStream	PipedInputStream, PipedOutputStream
File	FileReader, FileWriter	FileInputStream, FileOutputStream	FileInputStream FileOutputStream

Note that both the character stream group and the byte stream group contain parallel pairs of classes that operate on the same data sinks. These are described next:

The Character Filter Classes can be stacked on top of another data sink.

Sink Type	Character Filter Classes
Buffer	BufferedReader, BufferedWriter	characters are stored in buffer and that can enhance performances of a routine.
Line Counting	LineNumberReader :	can be used to read lines from a data while indexing the line numbers.
Conversion	InputStreamReader InputStreamWriter
Printing	PrintWriter	can be used to print information to a source or computer screen

Data Filter Classes:

Sink Type	Data Filter Classes
Compression	GZIPInputStream, GZIPOutputStream ZIPInputStream, ZIPOutputStream JARInputStream, JAROutputStream
Object	ObjectInputStream, ObjectOutputStream
Buffer	BufferedInputStream BufferedOutStream
Printing	PrintWriter

 

Sink Type	I/O Exceptions Class Hierarchy