Autoboxing

• Autoboxing is a programming term for automatically treating a primitive type as an object without having to create the wrapper object.
• Autoboxing is used in .NET and will be available in Java from J2SE 5.0
• This will allow to use primitive types in Java collections.

Unboxing is the opposite, but achieves the same goal - less code for the same functionality. It allows you to treat an Object wrapper for a primitive type as the primitive it represents, without calling a getValue method.

e.g.

Integer x = new Integer(2);
Integer y = new Integer(4);
Integer z = x + y;  // The value of z is now 6