Autoboxing
As wonderful as the primitive wrappers are, they often mean we end up creating a lot of objects (say with valueOf(int i)), passing them into a list, and then putting them back into their primitive values again with intValue()) when we drag them out of the list.
Autoboxing is a feature new to Java 1.5 that takes care of this for us. Here's how it works in a nutshell. Create a primitive type. Pass it as an argument to a method that expects an Object. It magically works. The JVM converts the primitive to its corresponding wrapper on-the-fly for you.
Autoboxing wouldn't be complete without auto-unboxing. As you might guess, this means that when you ask for a primitive directly from an Object wrapper, ye shall receive.
Because this concept ...
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