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In any non-trivial software application, developers are faced with having to deal with a collection of objects. Java Collections framework provides a rich set of options, but quite often I have seen people choosing one of the popular options such as an ArrayList or a HashSet without thinking through the consequences of their choice. On the other hand, some choose “performance” as the foremost criteria even though the scalability requirements are hard to predict beforehand.

My rule of thumb in choosing the right implementation of the Collection or Map interface is as follows:

Thread safety

In my opinion, thread safety requirements are a good start for narrowing down your options. Do I need thread safety or not? Most of the Collection implementations do not provide thread safety by default due to performance reasons. If you need your code to be thread-safe, then either you have to use a thread-safe implementation or be willing to wrap your collection using Collections.synchronized

Duplicates

Next critical criteria in choosing a good implementation are whether you have to store duplicate elements or not. Many collection implementations do permit duplicates, though this may not be desirable depending upon your requirements. This applies to duplicate elements in case of Lists or Queues and duplicate keys in case of a key-value pair structure such as Map.

Order

Does the ordering of elements in the collection matter? If yes, what type of ordering — natural ordering or the insertion order?

Null

Do we have to store nulls or not is another factor which could influence your choice.

Performance

This should be in my opinion the last criteria for most of the applications. The performance of different implementations varies, depending upon the type of implementation and also depending upon the thread-safety. ArrayList provides very fast insertion and retrieval, making it a good candidate for collections which require fast access to random elements. But if you want to remove elements frequently, then LinkedList is a better candidate. But in practice for most cases, you may not know in advance how much scalability is needed. Also, performance differences will start to show up only for very large datasets, so better to avoid premature optimization.

Summary

Choosing the right Collection implementation is often tricky, but you can’t make serious mistakes if you keep in mind some of the above rules of thumb. Thread-safety and ordering requirements should primarily dictate the choice of any implementation and only when you are faced with unusual scalability requirements, start looking at performance as major decision criteria.

Today (18.03.2014) is the official release date for Java 8 and the download page from Oracle now lists Java 8 as the latest release. I have been trying out various new features of Java 8 for more than 6 months now. I had downloaded the early access build and have been using it with intellij 12.1.6.

Support for Java 8 in intellij is reasonable so far, even though there have been some minor issues, one of them which I had reported and got fixed. This involved “Error suggestion” for checked exceptions inside a lambda expression containing a wrong suggestion to add the exception to the method definition which results in a non compilable code. Just like an anonymous inner class must catch all its checked exceptions, a lambda must also catch them all within the lambda block.  Also the code completion using custom templates inside the lambda block does not seem to work as well.

There are many examples to be found in the internet that explains very well what a lambda expression is and how they could make the life easier for Java developers in certain cases. Oracle’s tutorial is worth checking out as it also explains the necessity of lambda by starting with a pre Java 8 code and transforming it step by step using lambda expression.

Why lambda? A mature language facing a mid-life crisis

Though it might seem like things have never been better for Java, there are skeptics who believe that both the platform and the language have seen their best times already – those who regard Java as a cluttered, poorly designed and overreached language that is slow or incapable to adapt to the latest challenges in the industry. This doubt comes at a time when Java is facing increasing competition from dynamic languages like Ruby and functional languages like Scala and Clojure.

Competition from Ruby and Scala

public class HelloInnerWorld {

public static void main(String[] args) {
    new Thread(new Runnable() {
        @Override
        public void run() {
            System.out.println("Hello World");
        }
      }).start();
    }
}

public class HelloLambdaWorld {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new Thread(() -> System.out.println("Hello World")).start();
    }
}