Interfaces and Classes of the Collections Framework

The Collections Framework provides a well-designed set of interfaces and classes for storing and manipulating groups of data as a single unit, a collection. The framework provides a convenient API to many of the abstract data types familiar from computer science data structure curriculum: maps, sets, lists, trees, arrays, hashtables and other collections. Because of their object-oriented design, the Java classes in the Collections Framework encapsulate both the data structures and the algorithms associated with these abstractions. The framework provides a standard programming interface to many of the most common abstractions, without burdening the programmer with too many procedures and interfaces. The operations supported by the collections framework nevertheless permit the programmer to easily define higher level data abstractions, such as stacks, queues, and thread-safe collections.Collections Framework is first introduced with the Java 2 platform, Standard Edition, version 1.2.

Key Interfaces and Classes of the Collections Framework are given below

Collection Interface

Map Interface

Object class