Java Collections - Collection Interface

Greetings!

Collection interface is the base interface for most of the classes in Collection Framework. It mainly contains methods for add, remove and iteration.

public interface Collection<E> {

    boolean add(E element);

    Iterator<E> iterator();

    boolean remove(Object o);

    // ....
}

Other than that this contains a lot of common utility methods.

int size()
boolean isEmpty()
boolean contains(Object obj)
boolean containsAll(Collection<?> c)
boolean equals(Object other)
boolean addAll(Collection<? extends E> from)
boolean remove(Object obj)
boolean removeAll(Collection<?> c)
void clear()
boolean retainAll(Collection<?> c)
Object[] toArray()
<T> T[] toArray(T[] arrayToFill)

Java 8 has introduced new default methods to convert the Collection into a stream.

default Stream<E> stream()
default Stream<E> parallelStream()
default boolean removeIf(Predicate<? super E> filter)

• There is no concrete implementation of Collection interface. Instead it has several sub interfaces to handle different kind of Collections.
• Because most of the utility methods are common, there is partially implemented AbstractCollection that other implementation can extend. (this can be removed with Java 8 default methods)