Chunk reading in Spring Batch - not only chunk writing

This is a draft for an implementation of the read() interface method.

public T read() throws Exception {
    while (this.items.isEmpty()) {
        final List<T> newItems = readChunk();
        if (newItems == null) {
            return null;
        }
        this.items.addAll(newItems);
    }
    return this.items.pop();
}

Please note, that items is a buffer for the items read in chunks and not requested by the framework yet.