User:Brahmana/Streams in mozilla

The Stream Mystery

Streams are one of the things that are pretty confusing to me in the Mozilla/XPCOM code base. Today it happened again. So I set down to demystify this stream mystery.

As a starter I listed the variety of stream related interfaces. I have listed only the input streams. For most items listed here there is a output stream counterpart.

List of Stream Interfaces

• nsIInputStream
• nsIAsyncInputStream
• nsIBinaryInputStream
• nsIConverterInputStream
• nsIInputStreamTee
• nsILineInputStream
• nsIMultiplexInputStream
• nsIObjectInputStream
• nsIScriptableInputStream
• nsISeekableStream
• nsIStorageStream
• nsIStringStream
• nsIUnicharInputStream
• nsIUnicharLineInputStream
• nsIBufferedInputStream
• nsIFileInputStream
• nsIMIMEInputStream
• nsIPluginInputStream
• imgIEncoder