Java new I/O Interview Questions and Answers

The Java New IO is very powerful and it is all about performance!, performance!!, and performance!!!. But, you need to get your head around how the buffers work. Here are some questions and answers that will help you do that. Q. How does the Java NIO (i.e New IO) introduced in Java version 1.4 differ from the old IO?
A. The NIO is all about better performance.

IO	NIO (New IO)
Stream oriented. This means that you read one or more bytes at a time, from a stream. What you do with the read bytes is up to you. They are not cached anywhere. Furthermore, you cannot move forward and back in the data in a stream. If you need to move forward and back in the data read from a stream, you will need to buffer yourself first.	Buffer oriented. This means better performance. Data is read into a buffer from which it be processed later. You can move forward and back in the buffer. This gives you a bit more flexibility during processing. However, you also need to check if the buffer contains all the data you need in order to fully process it.
Blocking IO. This means when a thread invokes a read() or write(), that thread is blocked until there is some data to read, or the data is fully written. The thread can do nothing else in the meantime.	Non blocking IO. This means better performance. NIO's non-blocking mode enables a thread to request reading data from a channel, and only get what is currently available, or do nothing at all, if no data is currently available. Rather than remain blocked until data becomes available for reading, the thread can proceed with doing something else.
You need to create additional threads to read and write data in parallel. More threads means more CPU context switching and consuming more thread stacks.	Selectors.  This also means better performance. NIO's selectors allow a single thread to monitor multiple channels of input. You can register multiple channels with a selector, then use a single thread to "select" the channels that have input available for processing, or select the channels that are ready for writing. This selector mechanism makes it easy for a single thread to manage multiple channels. This is also known as multiplexing. The Apache MINA package is based on Java NIO to write high performance networking applications. For example, a TCP server.

Here is the diagrammatic overview:

Q. How do you manipulate the buffer in NIO?
A. The NIO buffer  has following 3 state variables -- position, limit, and capacity

• position: The position value keeps track of how much you have gotten from the buffer. It specifies from which array element the next byte will come. Thus, if you've written 1 bytes as shown below with shaded area to a channel from a buffer, that buffer's position will be set to 1 (starting from 0), referring to the second element of the array as shown in the diagram.
• limit: The limit variable specifies how much room there is left to put data into -- in the case of reading from a channel into a buffer or how much data there is left to get -- in the case of writing from a buffer into a channel. The position is always less than, or equal to, the limit. The limit is 3 (counting from 0) in the diagram below.
• capacity:  The capacity of a buffer specifies the maximum amount of data that can be stored in the underlying array. The limit can never be larger than the capacity. The capacity is 6 (counting from 0) in the diagram below.

In the above diagram, the position starts with 0, and after reading 1 byte, it becomes 1 byte, and the limit value of 3 states that there are 2 more bytes to be read. 



Q. What do you understand by terms flip( ) and clear( ) in NIO?
A.

Flip

When you are ready to write your data to an output channel. You must call the flip() method. This method does two key things:

1. It sets the limit to the current position.
2. It sets the position to 0.

You are now ready to begin writing data to a channel from the buffer starting from 0 to the limit.


Clear

After you have done your writes, the final step is to call the buffer's clear() method. This method resets the buffer in preparation for receiving more bytes. Clear does two key things:

1. It sets the limit to match the capacity.
2. It sets the position to 0.


Also, the get and put methods are used to get and put data to and from the buffer respectively. some coding examples are discussed in Java I/O interview Questions and Answers.


Q. What is in the NIO.2 package introduced in Java 7?
A. The more New I/O APIs for the Java Platform (NIO.2) in Java 7 enhance the New I/O APIs (NIO) introduced in Java 1.4 by adding

• The four asynchronous channels to the java.nio.channels package. 
•  The java.io.File class is upgraded to the java.nio.file.Path that allows logical manipulating of paths in memory without accessing the file system.
• The NIO.2 associates the notion of metadata like is hidden, is it a directory, size, access control, etc with attributes and provides access to them through the java.nio.file.attribute package. Since different file systems have different notions about which attributes should be tracked, NIO.2 groups the attributes into views, each of which maps to a particular file system implementation.
• The NIO.2 provides support for both hard links and symbolic links and the Path class knows how to detect a link and will behave in the default manner if no configuration of behavior is specified.
• The NIO.2 comes with a set of brand new methods for managing files and directories, such as create, read, write, move, delete, and so on. The most of these tasks are found in the java.nio.file.Files class.
• The FileVisitor interface introduced in Java 7 makes recursing through directories and files a breeze.
• The Watch Service API was introduced in Java 7 (NIO.2) as a thread-safe service that is capable of watching  a directory for changes to its content through actions such as create, delete, and modify. This means, with NIO.2, you no longer need to poll the file system for changes or use other in-house solutions to monitor the file system changes.
• Java 7 (NIO.2) introduces a new interface for working with Random Access Files with its SeekableByteChannel and an interface named NetworkChannel that provides network channel classes for tetworking.