I ask because I am sending a byte stream from a C process to Java. On the C side the 32 bit integer has the LSB is the first byte and MSB is the 4th byte.
So my question is: On the Java side when we read the byte as it was sent from the C process, what is endian on the Java side?
A follow-up question: If the endian on the Java side is not the same as the one sent, how can I convert between them?
I stumbled here via Google and got my answer that Java is big endian.
Reading through the responses I'd like to point out that bytes do indeed have an endian order, although mercifully, if you've only dealt with “mainstream” microprocessors you are unlikely to have ever encountered it as Intel, Motorola, and Zilog all agreed on the shift direction of their UART chips and that MSB of a byte would be 2**7 and LSB would be 2**0 in their CPUs (I used the FORTRAN power notation to emphasize how old this stuff is :) ).
I ran into this issue with some Space Shuttle bit serial downlink data 20+ years ago when we replaced a $10K interface hardware with a Mac computer. There is a NASA Tech brief published about it long ago. I simply used a 256 element look up table with the bits reversed (table[0x01]=0x80 etc.) after each byte was shifted in from the bit stream.
I would read the bytes one by one, and combine them into a long value. That way you control the endianness, and the communication process is transparent.