Suggested Projects | Java For Artists: The Art, Philosophy, And Science Of Object-Oriented Programming

Skill-Building Exercises

Web Research: In this chapter I emphasized how the Reader and Writer classes are more flexible with regards to character I/O because they allow you to specify the character encoding scheme used to translate the bytes stored on file to characters used in your program. Utilizing the Web, research the topic of Java character encoding. Specifically, determine the default local encoding for your computer and what encoding schemes your computer’s operating system supports.
API Exploration: Research the java.nio package and compare its functionality to that provided by the java.io package.
Code Drill: Compile and run each of the example programs listed in this chapter. Make changes to the programs to change the data written to the files. Expand the programs to utilize more of the interface methods offered by each of the java.io classes demonstrated.
API Exploration: Study the complete java.io package. Note the similarities between the classes that were discussed in this chapter and those that were omitted. Concentrate especially on those classes that read or write from other data sources and sinks to include Strings, arrays, and processes.
Programming: Write a short program to explore the effects of writing and reading various kinds of Serializable objects to and from a file.
API Exploration: Study the classes belonging to the java.text package. These classes can come in handy when manipulating text in your programs.
Computer I/O Sub-System Research: Obtain a book on operating systems and computer hardware systems and research the underlying principles and technologies that support modern computer file I/O operations. Pay particular attention to how computer systems implement Direct Memory Access (DMA) and I/O buffering.
Programming: Write a short program and experiment with the different methods provided by the PrintStream and PrintWriter classes.
Programming: Write a short program that converts text stored in a file to different Unicode character encodings. Utilize the knowledge gained from skill-building Exercise #1 to help you in this endeavor.
Programming: Write a short program that exercises the capabilities of the RandomAccessFile class.