Just Java™ 2

Design Philosophy

The design philosophy for Java I/O is based on these principles:

• Programs that do I/O should be portable, even though I/O has some non-portable aspects. Platform differences in file names and line terminators must be handled in a way that ensures the code runs everywhere.

• I/O is based on streams. A stream has a physical “device” at one end, like a file or a location in memory. That physical device is managed by some class, and you wrap (layer) additional logical classes on top of that for specific kinds of I/O.

• There are lots of small classes that do one thing, instead of a few big classes that do many things. There is one class that interprets data in binary format, and another class that reads data from a file. If ...