TCP/IP Sockets in Java, 2nd Edition

Chapter 5. NIO

This chapter introduces the main facilities of the “New I/O” packages. There are two important parts: the java.nio.channels package, which introduces the Selector and Channel abstractions, and the java.nio package, which introduces the Buffer abstraction. These are fairly advanced features, with a number of subtle details related to their usage. Therefore this chapter is organized a little differently than the earlier ones. In the first subsection we’ll motivate the NIO features by describing some problems that they are intended to solve—specifically, challenges that arise in building high-performance servers without them. (If you don’t care about the “why?” question, feel free to skip this section.) In Section 5.2, we present (as ...