Java Collection Framework Basic

Java collection framework and its classes are used to store and process group of objects.

Advantages of Collection framework:

•  Reduces programming effort: Useful data structures and utility classes to process data for searching/sorting etc. are readily available in Collection framework.
•   Provides inter- operability between API’s: Collection objects are used to pass/return to different API methods instead of creating different data structures for each API.
• Increased performance: High performance implementation of data structure in Collection framework.

  

Collection framework consists of:

1. Collection Interfaces: Different type of collection interfaces like set, map, list, queue.
2. Collection implementation classes: Different type of concrete implementations of collection interfaces.
3. Concurrent implementation: Implementations for concurrent use.
4. Algorithms: Utility classes with methods to do searching, sorting operations.

      You can check new features introduced in Java 6 in Collection Framework