Autoboxing
Beginning with JDK 5, Java has included two very helpful features: autoboxing and auto-unboxing. Autoboxing/unboxing greatly simplifies and streamlines code that must convert primitive types into objects, and vice versa. Because such situations are found frequently in Java code, the benefits of autoboxing/unboxing affect nearly all Java programmers. As you will see in Chapter 13, autoboxing/unboxing also contributes greatly to the usability of generics.
Autoboxing/unboxing is directly related to Java’s type wrappers, and to the way that values are moved into and out of an instance of a wrapper. For this reason, we will begin with an overview of the type wrappers and the process of manually boxing and unboxing values.
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