CS51 - Fall 2009 - Lecture 35

  • Exercise 19.7.3

  • Review of Readers and Writers
       - Input
          - FileReader
          - BufferedReader
       - Output
          - FileWriter
          - PrintWriter
       - Readers and writers deal with characters

  • Streams
       - A stream is a sequence of data
       - Streams deal with bytes (instead of characters)
          - What is a byte?
             - 8 bits
             - What is a bit?
                - a 0 or a 1
             - A byte is a common unit of storage in computer (kilobyte (KB), megabyte (MB), ...)
       - Are a way for a program in java to communicate to external components (i.e. outside of processor/memory)
       - What external components might we want to talk to?
          - files (disk drives)
          - internet/network (i.e. other computers)
          - memory
          - devices (e.g. cdrom, disk drive, ipod)
       - Streams are directional
          - input streams bring data into the program (ancestor of class InputStream)
          - output streams send data out from the program (ancestor of class OutputStream)
       - Different types of streams depending on the data that you want to read or write. What type of data might we want to read or write?
          - built in data types
             - DataInputStream(InputStream in)
                - readInt()
                - readDouble()
                - ...
             - DataOutputStream(OutputStream out)
                - writeInt(int i)
                - writeDouble(double d)
                - ...
          - Objects
             - ObjectInputStream(InputStream in)
             - ObjectOutputStream(OutputStream out)
       - FileInputStream and FileOutputStream vs. FileReader and FileWriter
          - FileReader and FileWriter can be thought of as character streams
          - what is the difference between using a DataOutputStream to print a double vs. a PrintWriter
       - Buffered streams
          - Most streams are unbuffered, that is when you read or write a character, it reads or writes a character
          - What's the problems with this?
          - To alleviate this, we can do buffered I/O
             - BufferedReader(Reader in)
                - InputStreamReader is a reader
                - InputStreamReader(InputStream in)
             - BufferedWriter(Writer out)
                - OutputStreamWriter is a writer
                - OutputStreamWrtier(OutputStream out)
       - Note also: InputStreamReader and OutputStreamReader allow us to go from our FileReader/FileWriter classes to Streams

  • show DrawingPanelNetwork demo
       - save and load file functionality
       - save some file and look at the data as a text file
          - can see some data we might, but it is a "binary" file... it has bytes written representing the data
       - can also transmit data over the network
          - What is a server and a client?
          - servers and clients communicate over the network
          - the main difference is that servers are started first and wait for clients to collect
          - also, there is usually a many to one relationship, with many clients for a single client, for example:
             - web (http) servers
             - mail (smtp) servers
             - ftp servers
             - file servers (e.g. nfs)

  • look at DrawingPanelNetwork code
       - top code is basically the DrawingPanel code
       - To read and write this data, what type of Stream will we need?
       - writeToStream
          - Takes as input an OutputStream (similar to what we did for SantasList)
          - creates a new ObjectOutputStream
          - what do you think the flush() method does?
             - don't actually need it here since close() will flush the data
          - don't forget to close()
       - readToStream
          - Similarly, takes as input an InputStream
          - creates a new ObjectInputStream
          - note that we need to type cast it
       - Why do you think we wrote these methods to take as input a Stream?
          - we can use the same methods to do the for our network transmitting
       - Sockets
          - a socket is a framework for bidirectional communication
          - sockets are specified by an IP address and a port
             - every computer has an IP address, think of it like a phone number
             - consists of 4 numbers 0 to 255 xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx
             - or, you can think of it as 4 bytes
             - think of the port, like an extension, it uniquely identifies what program/process on a computer another program is talking to
          - the server only need to specify a port, which is the port it is listening on
          - "localhost", is a keyword for specifying the current computer
       - beAServer()
          - ServerSocket is used to wait for a connection from a client
             - note that we only need to specify the port
          - drawingSocket.accept()
          - another blocking operation
          - waits for the client to connect and gives us the socket for the connection
          - socket.getOutputStream()
          - uses writeToStream to transmit the data
       - beAClient()
          - creates a new socket using the ip and the port specified
          - socket.getInputStream()
          - can leverage readToStream
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