More Collections QA

Q12) Is it better to have a HashMap with large number of records or n number of small hashMaps?

Ans) It depends on the different scenario one is working on:
1) If the objects in the hashMap are same then there is no point in having different hashmap as the traverse time in a hashmap is invariant to the size of the Map.
2) If the objects are of different type like one of Person class , other of Animal class etc then also one can have single hashmap but different hashmap would score over it as it would have better readability.

Q13) Why is it preferred to declare: List list = new ArrayList(); instead of ArrayList = new ArrayList();

Ans) It is preferred because:

1. If later on code needs to be changed from ArrayList to Vector then only at the declaration place we can do that.
2. The most important one – If a function is declared such that it takes list. E.g void showDetails(List list);
When the parameter is declared as List to the function it can be called by passing any subclass of List like ArrayList,Vector,LinkedList making the function more flexible

Q14) What is difference between iterator access and index access?

Ans) Index based access allow access of the element directly on the basis of index. The cursor of the datastructure can directly goto the 'n' location and get the element. It doesnot traverse through n-1 elements.

In Iterator based access, the cursor has to traverse through each element to get the desired element.So to reach the 'n'th element it need to traverse through n-1 elements.

Insertion,updation or deletion will be faster for iterator based access if the operations are performed on elements present in between the datastructure.

Insertion,updation or deletion will be faster for index based access if the operations are performed on elements present at last of the datastructure.

Traversal or search in index based datastructure is faster.

ArrayList is index access and LinkedList is iterator access.

Q15) How to sort list in reverse order?

Ans) To sort the elements of the List in the reverse natural order of the strings, get a reverse Comparator from the Collections class with reverseOrder(). Then, pass the reverse Comparator to the sort() method.

List list = new ArrayList();

Comparator comp = Collections.reverseOrder();

Collections.sort(list, comp)

Q16) Can a null element added to a Treeset or HashSet?

Ans) A null element can be added only if the set contains one element because when a second element is added then as per set defination a check is made to check duplicate value and comparison with null element will throw NullPointerException.
HashSet is based on hashMap and can contain null element.

Q17) How to sort list of strings - case insensitive?

Ans) using Collections.sort(list, String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER);

Q18) How to make a List (ArrayList,Vector,LinkedList) read only?

Ans) A list implemenation can be made read only using Collections.unmodifiableList(list). This method returns a new list. If a user tries to perform add operation on the new list; UnSupportedOperationException is thrown.

Q19) What is ConcurrentHashMap?

Ans) A concurrentHashMap is thread-safe implementation of Map interface. In this class put and remove method are synchronized but not get method. This class is different from Hashtable in terms of locking; it means that hashtable use object level lock but this class uses bucket level lock thus having better performance.

Q20) Which is faster to iterate LinkedHashSet or LinkedList?

Ans) LinkedList.

Q21) Which data structure HashSet implements

Ans) HashSet implements hashmap internally to store the data. The data passed to hashset is stored as key in hashmap with null as value.

Q22) Arrange in the order of speed - HashMap,HashTable, Collections.synchronizedMap,concurrentHashmap

Ans) HashMap is fastest, ConcurrentHashMap,Collections.synchronizedMap,HashTable.

Q23) What is identityHashMap?

Ans) The IdentityHashMap uses == for equality checking instead of equals(). This can be used for both performance reasons, if you know that two different elements will never be equals and for preventing spoofing, where an object tries to imitate another.

Q24) What is WeakHashMap?

Ans) A hashtable-based Map implementation with weak keys. An entry in a WeakHashMap will automatically be removed when its key is no longer in ordinary use. More precisely, the presence of a mapping for a given key will not prevent the key from being discarded by the garbage collector, that is, made finalizable, finalized, and then reclaimed. When a key has been discarded its entry is effectively removed from the map, so this class behaves somewhat differently than other Map implementations.