Java Executors

The old way of creating threads in Java was to extend the java.lang.Thread class or to implement the java.lang.Runnable interface and pass it to Thread as argument. In this approach, the task is modeled as a Runnable and you create one or more threads for each task. There were no built in facilities to re-use threads such as thread pools. Additionally, once a task was started, there was no easy way to know when the task completed without implementing the wait/notify mechanism.

Since JDK5, another abstraction for concurrent execution of tasks is the Executor interface.

public interface Executor {
   void execute(Runnable cmd) ; 
}

The task to be executed is coded by implementating the Runnable interface, similar to the older model. However in the old model, execution is typically hard coded by extending the java.lang.Thread class.

With the executor framework, the submission and execution is decoupled by using the Executors class to create different kinds of Executor's that can execute the runnable.

The ExecutorService interface extends Executor and provides additional methods that lets callers submit tasks for concurrent execution.

While one can implement Executor or ExecutorService and delegate to Thread to do the actual work, that is generally not the recommended way.

java.util.concurrent.Executors is a class with factory methods to create concrete implementations of ExecutorService. This includes flexible thread pool based implementations. Using thread pools for concurrent execution has the advantage that it lets your application scale.

public static ExecutorService newFixedThreadPool(int nThreads) creates a thread pool that created threads upto the size nThreads. After that it created additional threads only if one of the existing thread dies.

public static ExecutorService newCachedThreadPool() created a threadpool with no upper bound on the number of threads. It will create threads as needed but can reuse existing threads.

public static ExecutorService newSingleThreadExecutor() creates a single thread. If the existing one dies, it will create a new one. But you will never have more that one thread.

public static ScheduledExecutorService newScheduledThreadPool(int corePoolSize) lets you create a thread pool that can be scheduled to execute periodically.

Let us write a simple concurrent server using fixed thread pool.

1 public class WebServer {
2  private final ExecutorService tpool = Executors.newFixedThreadPool(50) ;
3
4  public void start() throws IOException {
5    ServerSocket socket = new ServerSocket(8080) ;
6    while(!tpool.isShutdown()) {
7        try {
8           Socket c = socket.accept() ;
9           tpool.execute(new Runnable() {
10               public void run() { process(c) ; }
11           }
12        } catch(Exception e) {
13           log("Error occured .." + e) ;
14        }
15    }
16  }
17  private void process(socket c) {
18    // service the request   
19  }
20  public void stop() {
21    tpool.shutdown() ;
22  }
23}

In line 2 we create an ExecutorService. In lines 9-11 we create a runnable for each task and submit it for execution. The shutdown call in line 21 is a graceful shutdown. Tasks that are already submitted will be completed and no new tasks are accepted.

The advantages of using Executors are:

   Decoupling of task creation with submission/excecution.
   Built in thread pools.
   Built in orderly shutdown.
   Built in scheduling. (mentioned above but not discussed)
   Ability to check or block on completion of tasks.

Today, if you needed a data structure such as a list or a Map, you use the classes in the collection framework java.util.*. Similarly for concurrent programming, you should use the executor framework in java.concurrent.* as it gives you lot of function that you would otherwise have to code yourself.

What is MapReduce ?

MapReduce is a parallel programming technique made popular by Google. It is used for processing very very large amounts of data. Such processing can be completed in a reasonable amount of time only by distributing the work to multiple machines in parallel. Each machine processes a small subset of the data. MapReduce is a programming model that lets developers focus on the writing code that processes their data without having to worry about the details of parallel execution.

MapReduce requires modeling the data to be processed as key,value pairs. The developer codes a map function and a reduce function.

The MapReduce runtime calls the map function for each key,value pair. The map function takes as input a key,value pair and produces an output which is another key,value pair.

The MapReduce runtime sorts and groups the output from the map functions by key. It then calls the reduce function passing it a key and a list of values associated with the key. The reduce function is called for each key. The output from the reduce function is a key,value pair. The value is generally an aggregate or something calculated by processing the list of values that were passed in for the input key. The reduce function is called for each intermediate key produced by the map function. The output from the reduce function is the required result.

As an example , let us say you have a large number of log files that contain audit logs for some event such as access to an account. You need to find out how many times each account was accessed in the last 10 years.
Assume each line in the log file is a audit record. We are processing log files line by line.The map and reduce functions would look like this:

map(key , value) {

    // key = byte offset in log file 
    // value = a line in the log file
    if ( value is an account access audit log) {
        account number = parse account from value
        output key = account number, value = 1
    }
}
reduce(key, list of values) {
    // key = account number
    // list of values {1,1,1,1.....}
    for each value
       count = count + value

    output key , count 
}

The map function is called for each line in each log file. Lines that are not relevant are ignored. Account number is parsed out of relevant lines and output with a value 1. The MapReduce runtime sorts and groups the output by account number. The reduce function is called for each account. The reduce function aggregates the values for each account, which is the required result.

MapReduce jobs are generally executed on a cluster of machines. Each machine executes a task which is either a map task or reduce task. Each task is processing a subset of the data. In the above example, let us say we start with a set of large input files. The MapReduce runtime breaks the input data into partitions called splits or shards. Each split or shard is processed by a map task on a machine. The output from each map task is sorted and partitioned by key. The outputs from all the maps are merged to create partitions that are input to the reduce tasks.

There can be multiple machines each running a reduce task. Each reduce task gets a partition to process. The partition can have multiple keys. But all the data for each key is in 1 partition. In other words each key can processed by 1 reduce task only.

The number of machines , the number of map tasks , number of reduce tasks and several other things are configurable.

MapReduce is useful for problems that require some processing of large data sets. The algorithm can be broken into map and reduce functions. MapReduce runtime takes care of distributing the processing to multiple machines and aggregating the results.

Apache Hadoop is an open source Java implementation of mapreduce. Stay tuned for future blog / tutorial on mapreduce using hadoop.

Spring Security Tutorial #1 - Authentication and Authorization

Spring security is a framework that lets you add security to spring based applications. Before Spring security, developers had to rely on J2EE security to secure java applications. J2EE provides very limited function. You could secure web resources or EJB methods. But there is nothing more. Additional drawback of J2EE security is that implementations are application server specific. If you do anything more that what is in the servlet or EJB specification, it is not portable.

In addition to basic authentication and authorization, Spring Security has support for:
Remember me authentication
Session management
ACL based security
Integration with CAS, LDAP, Open ID
and many other things.

It is not possible to cover all those topics in one article. I plan to write about Spring Security as a series of tutorials. This first installment #1 will get you started with Spring Security and help you setup basic authentication and authorization.

Authentication refers to ensuring that the user is who he or she claims to be. Any application that has any security will typically force the user to present a name and a password. If they match what is stored in the system, we say the user is authenticated and allow the user to continue using the application.

Authorization refers to ensuring that an authenticated user has the necessary permissions to perform some operation or access some data. Authorization involves checking a pre-defined policy which may say that these users have permission to perform these actions on this resource.

For this tutorial, let us take the simple web application we developed in Spring MVC blog and add security to it. Springmvc.zip was renamed to Springsecurityv1 and security metadata added. You can download the sample at Springsecurityv1.zip.

For this tutorial you will also need
(1) Spring 3.0
(2) Spring Security 3.x.
(3) Eclipse is optional. I use eclipse as my IDE. But you can use other IDEs or command line tools as well.
(4) A webserver like Tomcat
(5) Some familiarity with the Spring framework.

Note that Spring Security is packaged separately and is not included in core Spring.

Step 1:
As always, spring configuration begins in applicationcontext config file. We start by adding the namespace which has the spring configuration elements. In springsecurity-servlet.xml, the security namespace http://www.springframework.org/schema/security is added.

<beans xmlns:security="http://www.springframework.org/schema/security" 
       xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" 
       xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" 
       xsi:schemalocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans-2.0.xsd 
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/security
       http://www.springframework.org/schema/security/spring-security-3.0.3.xsd">
</beans>

Step 2:
Add the Spring security filters to the web.xml. These filters intercept requests and force authentication and authorization

<filter>
    <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
    <filter-class>org.springframework.web.filter.DelegatingFilterProxy</filter-class>
</filter>
<filter-mapping>
    <filter-name>springSecurityFilterChain</filter-name>
    <url-pattern>/*</url-pattern>
</filter-mapping>

Step 3:
Add a minimal Spring security configuration to springsecurity-servlet.xml.

<security:http auto-config="true">
    <security:intercept-url access="ROLE_manager" pattern="/**">
</security:intercept-url>
</security:http>

The http element is the element under which all web application related security configuration. The intercept-url says that for any request to any url ( pattern = "/*") , the user needs to be authenticated and a member of the role ROLE_manager.

When you try to access any URL in this application, Spring will redirect you to a page where you need to enter a username and password. The login page is generated by Spring.

But who are the valid users ? And which of them are part of role ROLE_manager.
Step 4:
A really simple way is to define the users in springsecurity-servlet.xml using the authentication-provider
element.

<security:authentication-manager>
    <security:authentication-provider>
      <security:user-service>
        <security:user authorities="ROLE_manager" name="tony" password="tony12">
        <security:user authorities="" name="raul" password="raul12">
        </security:user>
      </security:user>
    </security:user-service>
  </security:authentication-provider>
</security:authentication-manager>

In this authentication provider, 2 users tony and raul are defined in the configuration. Tony has the authority ROLE_manager.

For a production application, You will want define users, password and roles in database (or LDAP). see step 7 for database configuration.
Step 5:
From eclipse, export the war file (or use the provided war file).
Deploy the war file to tomcat.

Point your browser to http://localhost:8080/springsecurityv1/test.htm. You will be shown the login screen below.

Type in user tony and password tony12. Login will be successful and you will be served the web page below

Step 6:
Restart the browser. Clear cookies and sessions. Type the same URL.
You will be prompted for username/pwd. This time type in abc / abc12. The login will fail as abc is not a valid user.

Repeat with user raul /raul12. With raul the login succeeds. But access will be denied because raul does not have the ROLE_manager authority.
Step 7:
As mentioned earlier, you would normally not keep username/passwords in the spring configuration file. Spring provides the jdbc-user-service that lets you authenticate with users defined in a database.

In this app, springsecurity2-servlet.xml is second configuration that uses jdbc-user-service. The configuration is

<security:authentication-manager>
    <security:authentication-provider>
      <security:jdbc-user-service data-source-ref="securityDataSource"/>
    </security:authentication-provider>
  </security:authentication-manager>
  
   <bean id="securityDataSource"
       class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
       <property name="driverClassName" value="org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver" />
       <property name="url" value="jdbc:derby:/home/mks/mkprojects/database/springusers" />
   </bean>

For this to work, you need to create database tables required by Spring. See Spring documentation for database table schema.

In summary, getting started with Spring Security is quite easy. In a few simple steps, by adding some configuration metadata, we have enabled authentication and authorization for our web application.

When to use the Java volatile keyword ?

In the Java programming world, there is some misunderstanding around the volatile keyword. Most programmers never use it and you rarely see code that has it. In this article I try to remove the mystery surrounding volatile.

Section 8.3.1.4 of the Java language specification has this definition: A field may be declared volatile, in which case the Java memory model (§17) ensures that all threads see a consistent value for the variable.

Consider the class below:

public class SomeValue {
    private static long value = 0  ;
    public static void setValue(int i) {
        value = i ;
    }
    public static void getValue() {
        return i ;
    }
}

At time time1, thread t1 calls SomeValue.setvalue(3).
At time time2, thread t2 calls SomeValue.getValue().
Thanks to the java memory model, there is no guarantee that thread t2 see the value 3.

One way to fix the problem is the make the methods getValue and setValue synchronized. Declaring the member variable value volatile is another way to do the same.

So which approach is better ? To answer the question, there are 2 concepts that need to be examined.

1. Locking:
With synchronized, locking is involved. To execute code within a synchronized block, a lock must first be acquired. The lock is held until the block is exit. If another thread tries to execute the same code block, it will block until it can acquire the lock.

With volatile, no locking is involved. Whenever possible, avoiding locking is better because locking can make the application less scalable.

2. Atomicity:
An atomic operation is one that is indivisible.

public void setX(boolean val) {
    x = val ;
}

setX is an atomic operation. Every thread that calls setX concurrently can setX and expect it to behave correctly. Timing does not affect the result.

But consider the method

public void increase(long x) {
    value = value + x ;
}

It really consists of 3 operations: get the value, add x to it, store the value.
If two threads call increase, the result depends on timing.

Let us say at time1 , value is 3
At time2, thread t1 calls increase(4). It sees the current value at 3. But before it can update the value,
At time3, thread t2 calls increase(5). It sees the current value as 3 as well.
At time4, thread t1 updates the value to 3+4 = 7.
At time5, thread t2 updates the value to 3+5 = 8. This is known as a race condition. Depending on timing of event, you can get different results.

Synchronization makes the code within the synchronized block atomic. If you make the method synchronized,

public synchronized void increase(long x) {
    value = value + x ;
}

the increase method is atomic. Only one thread is able to increase the value at a time. When the method completes, every other thread will see the value. With synchronized, in the above example, the final value would be 3+4+5 which is 12 which is correct.

By just declaring value as volatile, this atomicity is not there. It two threads call increase at the same time, we cannot predict what the result is.

Back to the question we started with. When to use volatile ?

The volatile keyword can help when you know that your access to the field whether read or write is atomic. The benefit of volatile is that the changes to the field are published to other threads without the use of locking. When you are sure that operations are atomic, declaring a field as volatile is simpler that wrapping code in synchronized blocks.

An additional point to remember is that volatile is not necessary for fields that immutable or declared final. The Java memory model guarantees that final fields are visible to other threads without synchronization or volatile.

The classic use case of volatile is a boolean flag that is used to stop a long running thread.

public class LongRunningTask extend Thread {
    private volatile boolean stop = false ;
    public void run() {
       while(!stop) {
         doWork() ;
       }
    }
    public void stopTask() {
       stop = true ;
    }
}

If one thread calls stopTask, the main thread can immediately see the value and stop. stopTask is atomic.

However when you have operations that are non atomic such as the increase method, you need synchronization. JDK5 introduced atomic variable classes such AtomicInteger, AtomicLong etc in the package java.util.concurrent.atomic. These classes extend the volatile concept to compound operations such as read-modify-write. These can be used in place of volatile. A more detailed discussion of atomic classes is topic for another blog.

Spring AOP made simple

Certain types of code like logging, monitoring, security access checks, transaction boundary management etc apply to all methods in the application. These are known as cross cutting concerns. The poor programmers way of implementing cross cutting concerns is to the implement them in every method. Every method would begin with a checkAccess call, a fire call that fires a monitoring event, a call that starts a new transaction. When you implement a new method, you need to copy this common code to the new method.

Aspect oriented programming is a style and mechanism where common code factored out and is inserted before, after or around the real application code using either proxies or other techniques like code injection. Before we proceed any further, let us describe some AOP terminology.

An Aspect is a piece of common code that can be applied repeatedly to various places in the application. An example is code that may start a transaction or complete the transaction.

A join point is a point in the program, such as a method.

Advice is code that is part of the aspect and that is applied to a join point. Some different types of advice are before advice,after advice, around advice. Before advice is executed before the method. After advice is executed after the method is executed. In Around advice, part of the advice executes before the method and the other part after the method.

A pointcut is a set of join points to which advice may be applied. Generally some syntax or expression is used to match or determine the join points.

Enough threory. Let us get down to a real sample.Let us write a simple Spring application that prints a greeting. Then we will use Spring AOP to add a security check to the method by creating an Aspect with a before advice. Lastly we will add transaction support to the method by creating an Aspect with an around advice. Note that we will not be writing any real security or transaction code. The sample will just print a message where as in a real application you would have real code. You may download the complete source code at springaop.zip

For this tutorial you will also need
(1) Spring 3.0
(2) Eclipse is optional. I use eclipse as my IDE. But you can use other IDEs or command line tools as well. springaop.zip can be imported into eclipse.
(3) Some familiarity with the Spring framework.

Step 1: Code a simple Spring application

public interface Greeting {
    public String message(String target) ;
}

public class NewYearGreeting implements Greeting {
    public String message(String target) {
        System.out.println("From SpringAOP::" + target) ;
        return target ;
    }
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        ApplicationContext context =
        new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("springaop.xml");
        Greeting sprg = (Greeting) context.getBean("greetbean");
        sprg.message("Happy new year 2011") ;
   }
} 

Add the bean definition in springaop.xml:
<bean id="greetbean" class="com.mj.spring.aop.NewYearGreeting"/>
Run the above application. The following line is output:
From SpringAOP::HappyNewYear

Step 2: Add @AspectJ support by adding the following line to springaop.xml. @Aspectj is a style where aspects are declared by adding annotations to java classes. This style was developed by the AspectJ project. We use these annotations in steps 3 and 4.
<aop:aspectj-autoproxy/>

Step 3: Create a security Aspect as shown below. It is an ordinary java class with the annotation @Aspect. The checkAccess method is anotated as @Before and it is a before Advice. It applies to the pointcut execution(public * com.mj.spring.aop.*.*(..)). You can find more detailed explanation of this syntax in the Spring or AspectJ documentation.But you might have guessed that it means - execute the before advice before every public method of every class in the package com.mj.spring.aop.

@Aspect
public class SecurityAspect {
 @Before("execution(public * com.mj.spring.aop.*.*(..))")
 public boolean checkAccess() {
  System.out.println("Checking access before method invoke") ;
  return true ;
 }
}

Step 4: Create a transactions aspect as shown below. As in step 3, the class is annotated @Aspect.

@Aspect 
public class TransactionAspect {
 
 @Pointcut("execution(public * com.mj.spring.aop.*.*(..))")
 public void greetingmethod() {} 
 
 @Around("greetingmethod()") 
 public Object doTran(ProceedingJoinPoint pjp) throws Throwable {
  System.out.println("Starting a transaction Before calling the method") ;
  Object output = pjp.proceed();
  System.out.println("Completing the transaction After calling the method") ;
  return output ;
 }
}

The doTran method is the method that implements the around advice. The first parameter of the method that implements the around advice has to be of type ProceedingJoinPoint, which delegates the call to the actual target. Within the method you call the target by calling the proceed method. So the transaction is started before the proceed call which leads to target method invocation. The transaction is completed after the proceed() call - that is after the target method invocation. I have also made the pointcut generic so it can be applied to other methods if necessary. To define a pointcut that can be reused, create an empty method like greetingmethod() {} and add the @pointcut annotation to it. The @Around annotation on doTran uses this pointcut.

Step 5: Add the bean definitions for the aspects created in 3 & 4 to springaop.xml, so that the spring container knows about the aspects. This is an often forgotten step that can lead to unnecessary grief because the aspects will not get called.
<bean id="TransactionAspect" class="com.mj.spring.aop.TransactionAspect"/>
<bean id="SecurityAspect" class="com.mj.spring.aop.SecurityAspect"/>

Step 6: run the application. You will see the output:
Checking access before method invoke
Starting a transaction Before calling the method
in the method - From SpringAOP::Happy new year 2011
Commiting the transaction After calling the method

Using the techniques shown above, you can add sophisticated function to your application that is generally available only in complex containers like the EJB container or the SCA container. These containers typically use java dynamic proxies. SpringAOP is implemented using java dynamic proxies as well. But more importantly it makes it really easy to add cross cutting concerns to your application with need intrusive or repetetive code changes.

Designing Java Classes For Inheritance

In Object oriented programming, inheritance is concept that lets programmers re-use code as well specialize existing code. In Java, a class, the sub class can extend another class, the super class and there by inherit the attributes and behaviour (methods) of the super class. Specializing behavior is really a related concept called polymorphism. However you cannot specialize without inheriting.

Popular belief is that inheritance is always a good thing. However when used inappropriately, it can lead to code with bugs. The problems have been well documented in several books and articles. Yet very often we come across code with a complex inheritance hierarchy that looks cute, but is difficult to use and more often than not broken. Below I recap a few key points to remember when using inheritance in Java.

Consider the class MemberStore which is used to persist Members to a database

public class MemberStore {
  public void insert(Member m) {
    // insert into database
  } 
  public void insertAll(List<member> c) {
    // insert all members into the database
    // by calling the insert(m) for each Member
    Iterator i = c.iterator() ;
    while(i.hasNext()) {
      insert((Member)c.next()) ;

    }
  }
}

Let us say there is a need for a class that not only stores Members, but also keeps count of recently stored members. The wrong way to do it would be to
extend the above class

public class MemberStoreWithCounter extends MemberStore {
  private int counter = 0 ;
  public void insert(Member m) {
    counter++ ;
    super.insert(m) ;
  } 
  public void insertAll(Collection<member> c) {
    counter = counter + c.size() ;
    super.insertAll(c) ;
  }
  public int getCount() {
    return counter ;
  }
}

Let us try to use the new class

List<Member> list = new ArrayList<Member>() ;
list.add(new  Member(......)) ;
List.add(new  Member(......)) ;
MemberStorewithCounter m  = new .... ;
m.insertAll(list) ;
System.out.println(a.getCount());

What do you suppose the last line prints ? You were probably expecting 2. But it will print 4. The problem is that the insertAll method is implemented by calling the insert method. So the counter is incremented twice for each Member. This is the classic wrong use of inheritance.

The problem is that inheritance breaks encapsulation. Inheritance requires the programmer implementing the subclass class to know the implementation details of the super class. So generally it is safe to use inheritance only when the subclass and the superclass are under the ownership of the same programmer or team of programmers.

If you are designing your class so that other programmers may extend it, then it is preferable that the implemented methods of your class not call other overridable methods as was done by insertAll. If they do, then the javadocs must clearly document it. In the above example, the javadocs should say that insertAll calls insert. But this is not sufficient.

The javadocs for methods that can be safely overridden should say under what conditions and for what behavior the method should be overridden.

Classes that are not meant to be extended and methods that should not be overridden should be marked final so that programmers cannot extend them.

Constructors should never invoke overridable methods.

Lastly, in Java inheritance implies an "generalization/specialization" or "is a" relationship. Even if you do not intend to specialize, if you add a method to the subclass with the same signature of a method in the subclass, the method in the subclass overrides the method in the superclass. If there is no "is a" relationship, it is never a good idea to use inheritance.

The better way to add a counter to MemberStore is to write a wrapper around MemberStore that has MemberStore as a private member and delegates to it. This is otherwise known as composition.

public class BetterMemberStoreWithCounter {
  private MemberStore ms = new MemberStore() ;
  private int count = 0 ;
  public insert(Member m) {
     ms.insert(m) ;
     count++ ;
  }
  public insertAll(Collection<member> c) {
     count = count.size() ;
     ms.insertAll(c) ;
  }

}

Performance tip #1 - Java Strings

The java.lang.String class is a very convenient class for handling text or character data. It is used extensively in java programs. Sometimes excessively to the point that it degrades performance.

The String class is immutable. It cannot be changed. It has concatenation and substring methods that give the appearance of changing the string. In realilty, the jvm copies data and creates new strings.

// code 1 Inappropriate

String item ;
String[] listofitems ;
for (int i = 0 ; i < numitems ; i++)
item = item + listofitems[i] ;

// code 2 Much better
StringBuffer item ;
for (int i = 0 ; i < numitems ; i++)
item.append(listofitems[i]) ;

java.lang.StringBuffer is the mutable counterpart of String, that should be used for manipulating Strings. StringBuffer is threadsafe. java.lang.StringBuilder provides methods similar to StringBuffer, but the methods are not synchronized. StringBuilder can used when thread safety is not an issue.

In 1 ,a new String is created for every iteration of the loop and the contents of the previous iteration are copied into it. For n items, this is going to perform O(n square). Code 2 scales linearly O(n). For large values of n, the difference is significant.

There are a number of methods such as substring, trim, toLowerCase, toUpperCase that have this problem.

However there is one instance where concatenation is better. If the String can be resolved at compile time as in

// code 4
String greeting = "hello" + " new world" ;

At compile time , this gets compiled to
String greeting = "hello new world" ;

The alternative is
// code 5
String greeting = (new StringBuffer()).append("hello").append(" new world").toString() ;

Code 4 is more efficient as it avoid the temporary StringBuffer as well as the additional method calls.

Processing character arrays as is done in the C programming language is generally the fastest. But almost all public java libraries use String in their interfaces. So most of the time the programmer has no choice. So proper care needs to be take to ensure acceptable performance.

Lastly, converting Strings to numbers whether it is int, long, double or float can be expensive. Many programmers make the mistake of starting with String and then converting to a number type when they need to do a numerical computation. As a general rule, Strings should be used when processing text. For example, if you know that data being read from a file is of type int or float, read it into the correct type and avoid unnecessary conversion.