Introducing Nonblocking Sockets (O'Reilly)
As of Java 1.4, a programmer can use a brand-new set of APIs for I/O operations. This is the result of JSR 51, which started in January 2000 and has been available to programmers since Java 1.4 beta. Some of the most important new features in Java 1.4 deal with subjects such as high performance read/write operations on both files and sockets, regular expressions, decoding/encoding character sets, in-memory mapping, and locking files. In this article, I will discuss one particular new concept -- the new I/O API: nonblocking sockets."
