posted 23 Aug 2011 03:41 by Sanjeev Kumar
[
updated 4 Apr 2012 11:01
]
Here is a quick guide for selecting the proper implementation of a
Set,
List,
or Map in your application. The best general purpose or 'primary' implementations are likely ArrayList, LinkedHashMap, and
LinkedHashSet. Their overall performance is better, and you should use them
unless you need a special feature provided by another implementation. That
special feature is usually ordering or sorting.
Here, "ordering" refers to the order of items returned by an Iterator,
and "sorting" refers to sorting items according to Comparable
or Comparator.
Principal features of non-primary implementations :
- HashMap has slightly better performance than LinkedHashMap
- HashSet has slightly better performance than LinkedHashSet
-
TreeSet is ordered and sorted, but slow
-
TreeMap is ordered and sorted, but slow
-
LinkedList has fast adding to the start of the list, and fast
deletion from the interior via iteration
Iteration order for above implementations :
- HashSet - undefined
- HashMap - undefined
- LinkedHashSet - insertion order
- LinkedHashMap - insertion order of keys (by default), or 'access order'
- ArrayList - insertion order
- LinkedList - insertion order
- TreeSet - ascending order, according to Comparable / Comparator
- TreeMap - ascending order of keys, according to Comparable / Comparator
For LinkedHashSet and LinkedHashMap, the re-insertion
of an item does not affect insertion order.
While being used in a Map or Set, these items must
not change state (hence, it is recommended that these items be immutable
objects):
-
keys of a Map
-
items in a Set
Sorting requires either that :
To retain the order of a ResultSet as specified in an ORDER BY
clause, insert the records into a List or a LinkedHashMap.
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