What's a real-world example of using StringBuffer?

Question

I'm using Java 6.

I've only written a couple of multi-threaded applications so I've never encountered a time when I had several threads accessing the same StringBuffer.

Could somebody give me a real world example when StringBuffer might be useful?

Thanks.

EDIT: Sorry I think I wasn't clear enough. I always use StringBuilder because in my applications, only one thread accesses the string at a time. So I was wondering what kind of scenario would require multiple threads to access StringBuffer at the same time.

Answer 1

The only real world example I can think of is if you are targetting Java versions befere 1.5. The StringBuilder class was introduced in 1.5 so for older versions you have to use StringBuffer instead.

In most other cases StringBuilder should be prefered to StringBuffer for performance reasons - the extra thread safety provided by StringBuffer is rarely required. I can't think of any obvious situations where a StringBuffer would make more sense. Perhaps there are some, but I can't think of one right now.

In fact it seems that even the Java library authors admit that StringBuffer was a mistake :

Evaluation by the libraries team:

It is by design that StringBuffer and StringBuilder share no common public supertype. They are not intended to be alternatives: one is a mistake (StringBuffer), and the other (StringBuilder) is its replacement.

If StringBuilder had been added to the library first StringBuffer would probably never have been added. If you are in the situation that multiple threads appending to the same string seems like a good idea you can easily get thread safety by synchronizing access to a StringBuilder . There's no need for a whole extra class and all the confusion it causes.

It also might be worth noting that the .NET base class library which is heavily inspired by Java's libraries has a StringBuilder class but no StringBuffer and I've never seen anyone complaining about that.

Answer 2

当您拥有一个日志文件并且多个线程正在记录错误或警告并写入该日志文件时，一个简单的案例就是。

Answer 3

In general, these types of buffered string objects are useful when you are dynamically building strings. They attempt to minimize the amount of memory allocation and deallocation that is created when you continually append strings of a fixed size together.

So a real world example, imagine you are manually building HTML for a page, where you do roughly 100 string appends. If you did this with immutable strings, the JAVA virtual machine would do quite a bit of memory allocation and deallocation where with a StringBuffer it would do far less.

Answer 4

StringBuffer is a very popular choice with programmers.

It has the advantage over standard String objects, in that it is not an immutable object. Therefore, if a value is appended to the StringBuffer, a new object is not created (as it would be with String), but simply appended to the end.

This gives StringBuffers (under certain situations that cannot be compensated by the compiler) a performance advantage.

I tend to use StringBuffers anywhere that I dynamically add data to a string output, such as a log file writer, or other file generation.

The other alternative is StringBuilder. However, this is not thread-safe, as was designed not to be to offer even better performance in single-threaded applications. Apart from method signatures containing the sychronized keyword in StringBuffer, the classes are almost identical.

StringBuilder is recommended over StringBuffer in single threaded applications however, due to the performance gains (or if you look at it the other way around, due to the performance overheads of StringBuffer).