I am loading an image into my application from users and do not know in advance

  Click here to read full story

Question: I am loading an image into my application from users and do not know in advance what are dimensions. How do I find a width and height if it is an image and how to know if it is not? Maybe it is text file or some another kind of no image file.

Answer: The AWT provides two ways for you to track image loading: the MediaTracker class and the ImageObserver interface. The MediaTracker class is a utility class to track the status of a number of media objects. Media objects could include audio clips as well as images, though currently only images are supported.

The MediaTracker class is sufficient for many programs. You just create a MediaTracker instance, tell it to track one or more images, and then ask the MediaTracker the status of those images, as needed.

The ImageObserver interface lets you keep even closer track of image loading. Two methods: getWidth and the getWidth method of the Image class take one argument ImageObserver and return dimensions or -1 if it is not an image.

45 comments |    | Score: 3

Is it true that java.nio package name (I mean NIO part) means ''New Input/Output

  Click here to read full story

Question: Is it true that java.nio package name (I mean NIO part) means "New Input/Output"?
If so, why it was named like this?

Answer: Yes, NIO stands for "New Input/Output". These APIs - which were added to the J2SETM platform in Version 1.4 - are designed to boost performance of I/O operations in Java applications. The APIs also provide several features for things like regular expression handling and character-set conversion.

The new I/O (NIO) APIs introduced in v 1.4 provide new features and improved performance in the areas of buffer management, scalable network and file I/O, character-set support, and regular-expression matching. The NIO APIs supplement the I/O facilities in the java.io package.

Features
The NIO APIs include the following features:

• The scalable I/O API will make it easier to write production-quality web and application servers that scale well to thousands of open connections and can easily take advantage of multiple processors;
• The fast buffered binary I/O API will make it easier to write high-performance, I/O-intensive programs that manipulate streams or files of binary data;
• The fast buffered character I/O API will simplify the efficient handling of character streams and files; it will also bring regular expressions and a compact notation for formatted output to the Java platform, putting it on a par with other popular platforms such as Perl;
• The character-set converter API will give developers direct access the platform's built-in character-set converters and will also provide for the easy "plugging in" of new converters;
• The new set of I/O exceptions will make it easier to write programs that recover from different types of I/O failures in different ways, and to write user interfaces that behave consistently on different platforms when I/O failures occur;
• The new filesystem interface will work more consistently across platforms, will make it easier to write programs that gracefully handle the failure of filesystem operations, will provide more efficient access to a larger set of file attributes, will allow developers of sophisticated applications to take advantage of platform-specific features when absolutely necessary, and will allow support for non-native filesystems, such as network filesystems, to be "plugged in" to the platform.

You could ask: Why were not these needs met by older APIs? Yes it was possible, but it took much time to write custom code...
The new API makes this kind of work unnecessary!

This tip is based on SUN's documentation taken from http://java.sun.com

36 comments |    | Score: 4.5