Commons-Collections builds upon the Java collection classes by providing new interfaces, implementations and utilities.
Features listed from home page
- Bag interface for collections that have a number of copies of each object
- Buffer interface for collections that have a well defined removal order, like FIFOs
- BidiMap interface for maps that can be looked up from value to key as well and key to value
- MapIterator interface to provide simple and quick iteration over maps
- Type checking decorators to ensure that only instances of a certain type can be added
- Transforming decorators that alter each object as it is added to the collection
- Composite collections that make multiple collections look like one
- Ordered maps and sets that retain the order elements are added in, including an LRU based map
- Identity map that compares objects based on their identity (==) instead of the equals method
- Reference map that allows keys and/or values to be garbage collected under close control
- Many comparator implementations
- Many iterator implementations
- Adapter classes from array and enumerations to collections
- Utilities to test or create typical set-theory properties of collections such as union, intersection, and closure
