Saving and loading????

[George Siountris]

I am writing a phonebook database and i am trying to have it save the file to the hardrive or load it from the hard drive. Any suggestions on how i can do this or any known class that can do this would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance,
JavaDude.

[paul wheaton]

How are you storing it in memory? How do you want to store it on disk? (as a text file?)

[Dave Brookes]

I have used a Properties object loaded from and stored to a file to do this successfully for a small requirement.
Properties, a subclass of Hashtable is in the java.util package. It has methods to load from an InputStream and store to an OutputStream; FileInputStream and FileOutputStream for example.
I'm not sure how scalable this would be though.

[George Siountris]

Thanx for the replies,
Yes, Paul. Storing it as a text file would be nice. But, i am too new to programming to know if that is plausabile or even how you would do it. So could you please be more specific.
Thankyou,
JavaDude

[George Siountris]

Originally posted by Paul Wheaton:
How are you storing it in memory? How do you want to store it on disk? (as a text file?)

Yes Paul, i would like to save it as a text file to the harddrive. How would i do this? Please be specific.
Thankyou,
JavaDude

[paul wheaton]

Look up readers and writers in your favorite class library reference. FileReader and FileWriter should get you started.

[George Siountris]

Thanks Paul,
How about if i want to save it as something other than a text file. For instance if i want to save an array in memory so that i can refer back to it again for searching purposes. Would i still use FileReader and FileWriter?
Thankyou in advance,
JavaDude

[paul wheaton]

I would then use object streams and Serializable. You would then be making the leap to "persistant objects" and what a sweet and easy leap that is!