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

A simple case cane be when you are having a Log file and multiple threads are logging errors or warnings and writing to that log file.