Java in a Nutshell, 5th Edition

Generic Types

Generic types and methods are the defining new feature of Java 5.0. A generic type is defined using one or more type variables and has one or more methods that use a type variable as a placeholder for an argument or return type. For example, the type java.util.List<E> is a generic type: a list that holds elements of some type represented by the placeholder E. This type has a method named add(), declared to take an argument of type E, and a method named get(), declared to return a value of type E.

In order to use a generic type like this, you specify actual types for the type variable (or variables), producing a parameterized type such as List<String>.^[1] The reason to specify this extra type information is that the compiler can provide much stronger compile-time type checking for you, increasing the type safety of your programs. This type checking prevents you from adding a String[], for example, to a List that is intended to hold only String objects. Also, the additional type information enables the compiler to do some casting for you. The compiler knows that the get( ) method of a List<String> (for example) returns a String object: you are no longer required to cast a return value of type Object to a String.

The collections classes of the java.util package have been made generic in Java 5.0, and you will probably use them frequently in your programs. Typesafe collections are the canonical use case for generic types. Even if you never define generic types of your ...