At the heart of every computer program is the concept of exchanging data between two or more sources. This can be as simple as reading data from or writing data to a buffer within the same program or as seemingly complex as transferring data between two different processes running on different systems located on opposite sides of the world. The sources and destinations of data transfer are also diverse. On the typical personal computer, input devices include the keyboard and mouse, whereas output devices include the monitor and printer. Devices capable of both input and output include the disk drive, modem, and network interface card.
Streams were created to abstract the concept of exchanging information between these various devices and provide a consistent interface for programmers to interact with different sources of I/O in their programs. The basic 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of a stream is that data enters one end of a data channel in a particular sequence and comes out the other end in the same sequence-a first-in-first-out (FIFO) scheme. The very nature of streams is a perfect match for an object-oriented language such as Java. In addition, the built-in Java stream classes can be extended through inheritance to provide the same operations as those used for the primitive data types for your own user-defined types.
NOTE
Depending on the capability of the source or destination of a stream to process the data being requested or written in a timely manner, your program might encounter situations where it has to wait for a device to process a request. This side effect of stream processing is known as blocking and most often occurs when hardware devices are involved, such as disk drives or network connections. The good news is that Java's stream classes and methods were designed with blocking in mind. The effects of blocking are mitigated by checking the stream for blocking before reading or writing, using buffers or caches, or running stream I/O requests in threads so that blocking does not affect the rest of your program