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.
The NIO APIs include the following features:
1. Buffers for data of primitive types
2. Character-set encoders and decoders
3. A pattern-matching facility based on Perl-style regular expressions
4. Channels, a new primitive I/O abstraction
5. A file interface that supports locks and memory mapping
6. A multiplexed, non-blocking I/O facility for writing scalable servers