4.2. How Streams Work
As mentioned earlier, streams provide communication of data at the byte level, and are used for either reading or writing. Streams for reading inherit from a common superclass, the java.io.InputStream class, shown in Figure 4-3. Likewise, streams used for writing data inherit from the superclass java.io. OutputStream, shown in Figure 4-4. These are abstract classes; they cannot be instantiated. Instead, an appropriate subclass for the task at hand is created. Several streams inherit directly from either InputStream or OutputStream, but most inherit from a filter stream.
Figure 4-3. Input streams inherit from InputStream, although not always directly.
Figure 4-4. Output streams inherit from OutputStream, although not always ...
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