Special Edition Using Java 2 Standard Edition

In the Beginning

The collection framework introduced with the Java 1.2 API provided much needed new functionality, but several collection classes have been a part of the language since the beginning. Namely, the Vector, Stack, and Hashtable classes and the Enumeration interface have been around since the 1.0 API. With the release of Java 1.2, Vector and Hashtable were retrofitted to implement List and Map, respectively. This was done to integrate them into the collection framework, but, beyond that, their functionality has remained unchanged.

This section provides an overview of how these classes are used because it is likely you will see them in practice for some time to come. You should view them as legacy classes only, however. When you are ...