David McReynolds

As Jason Bell pointed out in his editorial "A Modern Day Cinderella" (JDJ, Vol. 8, issue 9), the spotlight is on J2EE and as a result many programmers are ignoring the foundation of the JDK. J2SE is the Java equivalent of C/C++ standard libraries. Here we deal with the lower-level entities, like the Number types, Integer, Long, Float, and Double. The Java Collections Framework (JCF) should be your first choice when faced with the task of managing any type of collection. The Collections API is one of the most useful parts of the JDK. Looking back at the projects I've worked on over the past 13 years, to some degree all of them involved managing collections of data structures. In this article I'll review the collections architecture. I'll also point out some of the useful features of the collections API (sorting and searching). To begin I'll go over the class categori... (more)