No, the PrintWriter obtained via ServletResponse has no idea of autoFlush. autoFlush is for a JspWriter's output object. The API of JspWriter gives you a hint :
If the page is not buffered, output written to this JspWriter object will be written through to the PrintWriter directly, which will be created if necessary by invoking the getWriter() method on the response object. But if the page is buffered, the PrintWriter object will not be created until the buffer is flushed and operations like setContentType() are legal. Since this flexibility simplifies programming substantially, buffering is the default for JSP pages.
