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The Java language development team that created the original java.util collection classes was fairly new to object oriented design and collection frameworks and therefore made some common mistakes:
- using implementation inheritance instead of delegation (a
Stackis not aVector!) - exposing underlying implementations (e.g. hashtable, linked list, and tree)
- confusing ordered and sortable collections (e.g.
SortedSetwhich is really an ordered set)
We forgive them, however, since they got a lot of things right 😉.
Subsequent additions to the java.util package helped address some of these issues, but the designers were somewhat constrained by the original mistakes to maintain backward compatibility.
This project starts with a clean slate. It defines a set of Java collection classes that are independent
of the java.util collection classes but that still interoperate with them and also integrate with the
built-in Java language features that depend on the java.lang.Iterable interface. These classes provide
the following nice features:
- simple, easy to understand interfaces
- self-optimizing implementations
- a well designed framework in which to work
There is a long standing tradition of using zero-based indexing when accessing arrays and collections. This dates back to the days of C where the indexes were referring directly to offsets in memory. The need for this convention has long passed, and it is now time to follow a more intuitive indexing strategy that makes sense to humans and fits in better with the additional reversed indexing style supported by many of the newer scripting languages. The Crater Dog Technologies™ collections use ordinal-based indexing as follows:
Index: 1 2 3 4 5
or [ "first", "second", "third", "fourth", "last" ]
Index: -5 -4 -3 -2 -1
To begin using the Crater Dog Technologies™ Java Collection Framework, follow the links displayed in the sidebar to the right.