Techniques for handling very large strings in Java

In my previous blog, I had jotted down the perils of storing large strings in memory. So what are the alternatives? Listing down a few at the top of my head right now.

1. Stream the string to a file and read chunk-wise from the file when required.
2. Store an array of strings, instead of storing a large string. A large continuous block of memory may not be available, but there could be small holes in the fragmented heap.
3. Compress the string using GZIP compression methods. Use the GZIPWriter class to keep appending strings to a byte-buffer.
4. If the large XML string is to be sent back as a webservice response, utilize the streaming support in SOAP stacks such as Axis 2 and CXF. Evaluate the use of MTOM for large attachments.
5. If you are operating on a large number of files, first deal with the 'large' files. To understand why, please peruse these links - Link 1 & Link 2

In one of the scenarios, the large XML string had to be fed to the JasperReports engine. Found a few interesting options to deal with this challenge here.