what's the point of java.nio?

[Bart Locanthi]

also important are

* scatter/gather i/o
* platform-independent adjustable byte ordering

Adam Megacz wrote:

>Er, I must be a dunce or something.  I've read through all the nio
>introductions I can find, and I still can't figure out why Sun
>introduced an entire package instead of two methods:
>
>  static InputStream InputStream.select(InputStream[])
>  static boolean Socket.nonBlockingConnect()
>
>It looks like given these two functions I could implement all of
>java.nio on top of java.io.  And the converse (io on nio) is certainly
>true (libgcj does it).
>
>So the only conclusion I'm left with is that it's somehow easier to
>implement the native method support for nio more efficiently, but I
>can't see how that is the case.
>
>Can anybody clue me in?
>
>  - a
>
>  
>