Collection vs Collections in Java.
Matam Kirankumar
Engineering Manager at HashedIn by Deloitte with expertise in Cloud Computing
Differentiate between Collection and collections in the context of Java.
Collection?: In the java.util.package, there is an interface called a collection. It’s used to represent a collection of separate objects as a single entity. It’s equivalent to the container in the C++ programming language. The collection framework’s root interface is referred to as the collection. It has a number of classes and interfaces for representing a collection of individual objects as a single unit. The key sub-interfaces of the collection interface are List, Set, and Queue. Although the map interface is part of the Java collection framework, it does not inherit the interface’s collection. The Collection interface’s most significant functions are add(), remove(), clear(), size(), and contains().
Collections: The java.util.package has a utility class called Collections. It defines various utility methods for working with collections, such as sorting and searching. All of the methods are static. These techniques give developers much-needed convenience, allowing them to interact with Collection Framework more successfully. It provides methods like sort() to sort the collection elements in the normal sorting order, and min() and max() to get the minimum and maximum value in the collection elements, respectively.
On the other hand, Collections (note the plural form) is a class in the same package, java.util.Collections. It provides a set of static utility methods for manipulating collections, such as sorting, searching, shuffling, and finding the minimum or maximum element in a collection.
While Collection is an interface that defines the behavior of a group of objects, Collections is a class that provides implementations of various algorithms for manipulating collections.