Introduction

Java comes with a built-in Collections API, allowing you to manipulate data structures with very little effort. A collection is an object that contains multiple elements. Collections are used to store, share, process, and communicate aggregated data. We call this system the Java collections framework.

As part of this framework, there are different components that are used to optimize our interaction with the actual data:

• Interfaces: Abstract data types that represent collections
• Implementations: Specific implementations of the collection interfaces
• Algorithms: Polymorphic methods used to process the data within a collection for operations such as sorting and searching

  Note

  Other programming languages have their own collection frameworks. For example, C++ has the Standard Template Library (STL). Java boasts simplicity when it comes to its collection framework.

Using the collections framework has many benefits, including a reduction in the complexity...