As you work through this book, you'll find that in several instances, the class StringBuilder is used, most often in the manner that you're used to seeing StringBuilder used. StringBuilder is a new Tiger class intended to be a drop-in replacement for StringBuffer in cases where thread safety isn't an issue.
Replace all your StringBuffer code with StringBuilder code. Reallyit's as simple as that. If you're working in a single-thread environment, or in a piece of code where you aren't worried about multiple threads accessing the code, or synchronization, it's best to use StringBuilder instead of StringBuffer. All the methods you are used to seeing on StringBuffer exist for StringBuilder, so there shouldn't be any compilation problems doing a straight search and replace on your code. Example 1-5 is just such an example; I wrote it using StringBuffer, and then did a straight search-and-replace, converting every occurrence of "StringBuffer" with "StringBuilder".
package com.oreilly.tiger.ch01;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Iterator;
import java.util.List;
public class StringBuilderTester {
public static String appendItems(List list) {
StringBuilder b = new StringBuilder( );
for (Iterator i = list.iterator( ); i.hasNext( ); ) {
b.append(i.next( ))
.append(" ");
}
return b.toString( );
}
public static void main(String[] args) {
List list = new ArrayList( );
list.add("I");
list.add("play");
list.add("Bourgeois");
list.add("guitars");
list.add("and");
list.add("Huber");
list.add("banjos");
System.out.println(StringBuilderTester.appendItems(list));
}
}
You'll see plenty of other code samples using StringBuilder in the rest of this book, so you'll be thoroughly comfortable with the class by book's end.
...all the new formatting stuff in Tiger, like printf( ) and format( )? StringBuilder, as does StringBuffer, implements Appendable, making it usable by the new Formatter object described in Chapter 9. It really is a drop-in replacementI promise!