Hello,
I want to produce a simple GUI application that mimics a bulletin board. Where there would be a GUI that people could insert a message, and I could allow others to view the past messages and possibly allow some filtering as to what they see.

I want to go from the GUI window to a text file to hold the past messages. After the text file I will probably move up to a DB, but for now, I think it is a good starter application.

I am having trouble with the IO class, because of the so many ways to read and write data, and was hoping someone may give me some guidance as to the best way to handle the IO, (which classes) or point me to a tutorial where they are reading a line at a time, and possibly putting them into a collection and then showing it in a GUI.

I know that is kind of a large question, but any assistance to get me started would be helpful, and then I can refine my questions as I begin building my project.

Thanks for your time,
Scott

 

 

Check this for IO
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/index.html

 

 

Check out:
http://www.javacoffeebreak.com/java103/java103.html
and
http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/essential/io/index.html

I used the above links to come up with the above code to write to a file:
try {
FileOutputStream out = new FileOutputStream("SearchTableFile.Dat"); // Output file name
PrintStream p = new PrintStream(out); //Create a stream to write to the file.
for (int i=0; i<SearchTableFileData.length; i++) {
p.print(SearchTableFileData[i]); //write data stored in SearchTableFileData Array
p.print("\n"); // write end of line character.
}
// try and catch are error handling
} catch(IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Error: " ioe);
}

To read the file back into the Array I have:
try {
DataInputStream in2 = new DataInputStream(
new FileInputStream("SearchTableFile.Dat")); // Input File Name and Stream
SearchTableFileData = new String[SearchTableFileLines];
line = in2.readLine(); //reads first line
SearchTableFileLines = 0;
while (line != null) {
SearchTableFileData[SearchTableFileLines] = line;
SearchTableFileLines = 1;
line = in2.readLine(); //reads next line
}
in2.close();
} catch (EOFException e) {

} catch(IOException ioe) {
System.out.println("Error: " + ioe);
}

Hope this helps. The file reading routine has some variable that are declared elsewhere in the code and I didn't think it was necessary to explain all of them.