Java Generics and Collections

Chapter 10. The Main Interfaces of the Java Collections Framework

Figure 10-1 shows the main interfaces of the Java Collections Framework, together with one other—Iterable—which is outside the Framework but is an essential adjunct to it. Its purpose is as follows:

• Iterable defines the contract that a class has to fulfill for its instances to be usable with the foreach statement.

And the Framework interfaces have the following purposes:

• Collection contains the core functionality required of any collection other than a map. It has no direct concrete implementations; the concrete collection classes all implement one of its subinterfaces as well.

• Set is a collection, without duplicates, in which order is not significant. SortedSet automatically sorts its elements and returns them in order. NavigableSet extends this, adding methods to find the closest matches to a target element.

• Queue is a collection designed to accept elements at its tail for processing, yielding them up at its head in the order in which they are to be processed. Its subinterface Deque extends this by allowing elements to be added or removed at both head and tail. Queue and Deque have subinterfaces, BlockingQueue and BlockingDeque respectively, that support concurrent access and allow threads to be blocked, indefinitely or for a maximum time, until the requested operation can be carried out.

• List is a collection in which order is significant, accommodating duplicate elements.

• Map is a collection which uses key-value associations ...