Thankyou for your guidance i will go and have a look at that example.
As system.println is asynchronous I am now considering a buffered approach to sending serial data. I will use the Girino oscilloscope project as a example for a ring buffer of ints. It would mean that my Java code would need to check for serial bytes less often - hey i could even use a interrupt and free up some CPU cycles hence reduce power usage (My secondary reason for determining the system.print behaviour).
Is there a document / code example that i can read to figure out how the buffering works in Arduino?
At the moment I get some garbage at the start of the serial stream, I have coded around this in the Java app by having a protocol in place, however there are a couple of little quirks I would like to fix but need to understand the Arduino serial buffer better.