Programmer's Guide to Java™ Certification, A: A Comprehensive Primer, Second Edition

11.6. Sorted Sets and Sorted Maps

Sets and maps have special interfaces, called SortedSet and SortedMap, for implementations that sort their elements in a specific order (see Figures 11.2 and 11.3). Objects can specify their natural order by implementing the Comparable interface, or be dictated a total order by a comparator object that implements the Comparator interface.

We'll first look at the two interfaces Comparable and Comparator, before discussing sorted sets and maps.

The Comparator Interface

Precise control of ordering can be achieved by creating a customized comparator that imposes a specific total ordering on the elements. All comparators implement the Comparator interface, which has the following single method:

 int compare(Object ...