Java provides the collections framework which consists of classes and interfaces for commonly reusable data structures such as lists, dynamic arrays, sets, and so on. The framework has a unified architecture for representing and manipulating collections, enabling collections to be used independently of implementation details via its interfaces.

The framework includes:

• interfaces that represent different types of collections;
• primary implementations of the interfaces;
• legacy implementations from earlier releases (known as "old collections");
• special-purpose implementations (like immutable collections);
• algorithms represented by static methods that perform useful operations on collections.

In this topic, we will only consider the basic interfaces from the collections framework placed in the java.util package.

Commonly used interfaces

There are two root generic interfaces Collection<E> and Map<K,V>, and some more specific interfaces to represent different types of collections.

The interface Collection<E> represents an abstract collection, which is a container for objects of the same type. It provides some common methods for all other types of collections.

The interfaces List<E>, Set<E>, Queue<E>, SortedSet<E>, and Deque<E> represent different types of collections. You cannot directly create an object of them since they are just interfaces. But each of them has several implementations. As an example, the ArrayList class, that represents a resizable array, is a primary representation of the List<E> interface. Other interfaces, as well as their implementations, will be considered in the following topics.

Another root interface is Map<K,V> that represents a map (or dictionary) for storing key-value pairs where K is the type of keys and V is the type of stored values. In the real world, a good example of a map is a phone book where keys are names of your friends and values are their phones. The Map<K,V> interface is not a subtype of the Collection interface, but maps are often considered as collections since they are part of the collection framework and have similar methods.

提示

Note, the Collection and Map interfaces do not extend each other.

The Collection interface

Here are common methods provided by the Collection interface.

• int size() returns the number of elements in this collection;
• boolean isEmpty() returns true if this collection contains no elements;
• boolean contains(Object o) returns true if this collection contains the specified element;
• boolean add(E e) adds an element to the collection. Returns true, if the element was added, else returns false;
• boolean remove(Object o) removes a single instance of the specified element;
• boolean removeAll(Collection<?> collection) removes elements from this collection that are also contained in the specified collection;
• void clear() removes all elements from this collection.

It is possible to refer to any particular collection via this base interface since, as you know, the superclass can be used to refer to any subclass object derived from that superclass.

Let's create languages collection and add three elements to it:

Collection<String> languages = new ArrayList<>();

languages.add("English");
languages.add("Deutsch");
languages.add("Français");

System.out.println(languages.size()); // 3

This approach allows you to replace the concrete collection at any time without changing the code that uses it. It also fosters software reuse by providing a standard interface for collections and algorithms to manipulate them. It may sound complicated now, but the more you work with collections, the more understandable it will become.

It is impossible to get an element by index via the Collection interface because it is very abstract and does not provide such a method. But if it doesn't matter for you which particular collection to use, you can work via this interface.

注意

It is important to understand that the order of the elements in the ArrayList is still preserved. We simply cannot call the get method via the Collection interface.

Every collection can be cast to a string by using toString and compared with another collection using the equals method. These methods come from Object and their behavior depends on elements stored in the collection and the type of the collection itself.

Mutable and Immutable collections

All collections can be divided into two large groups: mutable and immutable. They both implement the Collection<E> interface, but immutable collections will throw UnsupportedOperationException when trying to invoke some methods which change them: for example, add, remove, clear.

In the next topics, we will consider how to create and when to use immutable collections. Now just remember that they are present here.

Iterating over collections

If you would like to iterate over all elements of any collection, you can use the for-each style loop. Let's return to our languages collection:

for (String lang : languages) {
    System.out.println(lang);
}

This code prints all elements of this collection.

English
Deutsch
Français

The order of elements when iterating depends on the type of particular collection that is actually being used.

If you are already familiar with method references or lambda expressions, you can use another style for iterations using the forEach(Consumer<T> consumer) method:

languages.forEach(System.out::println); // with method reference
languages.forEach(elem -> System.out.println(elem)); // with lambda expression

This looks very readable but is optional for use.

Removing elements

It is also possible to remove elements from a mutable collection (like ArrayList).

languages.remove("Deutsch");

System.out.println(languages.size()); // 2

提示

Note, the remove as well as the contains methods rely on the method equals of the elements. If you store non-standard classes in the collection, equals together with hashCode should be overridden.

Again, if you are already familiar with lambda expressions, you can invoke the removeIf method to remove all of the elements that satisfy the given predicate:

languages.removeIf(lang -> lang.startsWith("E")); // it removes English

System.out.println(languages.size()); // 1

Use any way you like.

Conclusion

Java collections framework provides a set of interfaces with common methods for different types of collections. We've considered the Collection<E> interface which is an abstract container for storing values of the same type. Any particular collection (excluding maps) can be used through it in a program and can be iterated through by using the for-each loop or the forEach method.

For now, we confine ourselves to this much. All other interfaces including Map<K,V> will be considered in the following topics.