This tutorial takes you on an extended tour of the
Java Collections Framework. The tutorial starts with a
few simple programming examples for beginners and experts alike, to get started with the
Collections Framework quickly. The tutorial continues with a discussion of sets and maps,
their properties, and how their mathematical definition differs from the Set
,
Map
, and Collection
definitions within the Collections Framework. A
section on the history of Java Collections Framework clears up some of the confusion around
the proliferation of set- and map-like classes. This tutorial includes a thorough
presentation of all the interfaces and their implementation classes in the Collections
Framework. The tutorial explores the algorithm support for the collections, as well as
working with collections in a thread-safe and read-only manner. In addition, the tutorial
includes a discussion of using a subset of the Collections Framework with JDK 1.1. The
tutorial concludes with an introduction of JGL, a widely used algorithm and data structure
library from ObjectSpace that predates the Java Collections Framework.
Concepts
At the end of this tutorial you will know the following:
- The mathematical meaning of set, map, and collection
- The six key interfaces of the Collections Framework
Objectives
By the end of this tutorial, you will know how to do the following:
- Use the concrete collection implementations
- Apply sorting and searching through collections
- Use read-only and thread-safe collections
copyright 1996-2000 Magelang Institute dba jGuru