Collections in Java

Collections in java is a framework that provides an architecture to store and manipulate the group of objects.This framework has several useful classes which have tons of useful functions which makes a programmer task super easy. All the operations that you perform on a data such as searching, sorting, insertion, manipulation, deletion etc. can be performed by Java Collections.
Java Collection simply means a single unit of objects. Java Collection framework provides many interfaces (Set, List, Queue, Deque etc.) and classes (ArrayList, Vector, LinkedList, PriorityQueue, HashSet, LinkedHashSet, TreeSet etc).

Collection framework represents a unified architecture for storing and manipulating group of objects. It has:

1. Interfaces and its implementations i.e. classes
2. Algorithm

Hierarchy of Collection Framework

List

A List is an ordered Collection (sometimes called a sequence). Lists may contain duplicate elements. Elements can be inserted or accessed by their position in the list, using a zero-based index.

• ArrayList
• LinkedList
• Vector

Set

A Set is a Collection that cannot contain duplicate elements. There are three main implementations of Set interface: HashSet, TreeSet, and LinkedHashSet. HashSet, which stores its elements in a hash table, is the best-performing implementation; however it makes no guarantees concerning the order of iteration.

• HashSet
• LinkedHashSet
• TreeSet

Map

A Map is an object that maps keys to values. A map cannot contain duplicate keys. There are three main implementations of Map interfaces: HashMap, TreeMap, and LinkedHashMap.
HashMap: it makes no guarantees concerning the order of iteration
TreeMap: It stores its elements in a red-black tree, orders its elements based on their values; it is substantially slower than HashMap.
LinkedHashMap: It orders its elements based on the order in which they were inserted into the set (insertion-order).

• HashMap
• TreeMap
• LinkedHashMap

Iterator/ListIterator

Both Iterator and ListIterator are used to iterate through elements of a collection class. Using Iterator we can traverse in one direction (forward) while using ListIterator we can traverse the collection class on both the directions(backward and forward).

• Iterator
• ListIterator