Some of the very useful interfaces of Collection Framework
Iterators - Similar to the familiar Enumeration interface, but more powerful, and with improved method names.
- Iterator - In addition to the functionality of the Enumeration interface, allows the user to remove elements from the backing collection with well defined, useful semantics.
- ListIterator - Iterator for use with lists. In addition to the functionality of the Iterator interface, supports bi-directional iteration, element replacement, element insertion and index retrieval.
Ordering
- Comparable - Imparts a natural ordering to classes that implement it. The natural ordering may be used to sort a list or maintain order in a sorted set or map. Many classes have been retrofitted to implement this interface.
- Comparator - Represents an order relation, which may be used to sort a list or maintain order in a sorted set or map. Can override a type's natural ordering, or order objects of a type that does not implement the Comparable interface.
Array Utilities
- Arrays - Contains static methods to sort, search, compare, hash, convert to String, and fill arrays of primitives and Objects.
Some of the Basic Operations available in Collection Framework
- sort - Sorts a list using a merge sort algorithm, which provides average-case performance comparable to a high-quality quicksort, guaranteed O(n*log n) performance (unlike quicksort), and stability (unlike quicksort). (A stable sort is one that does not reorder equal elements.)
- binarySearch - Searches for an element in an ordered list using the binary search algorithm.
- reverse - Reverses the order of the elements in the a list.
- shuffle - Randomly permutes the elements in a list.
- fill - Overwrites every element in a list with the specified value.
- copy - Copies the source list into the destination list.
- min - Returns the minimum element in a collection.
- max - Returns the maximum element in a collection.
- rotate - Rotates all of the elements in the list by the specified distance.
- replaceAll - Replaces all occurrences of one specified value with another.
- indexOfSubList - Returns the index of the first sublist of source that is equal to target.
- lastIndexOfSubList - Returns the index of the last sublist of source that is equal to target.
- swap- Swaps the elements at the specified positions in the specified list.
- frequency - Counts the number of times the specified element occurs in the specified collection.
- disjoint - Determines whether two collections are disjoint, in other words, whether they contain no elements in common.
- addAll - Adds all of the elements in the specified array to the specified collection.
