One of the most welcome and useful features of the new Java 2 Platform is the Java Collections Framework, a set of interfaces and classes for classic container types such as sets, lists, and dictionaries.  The Framework is welcome because the existence of standard interfaces for collections help prevent millions of Java programmers from wasting time writing their own individual and incompatible implementations of these useful classes. The JCF team at Sun have also included high-performance implementations of the basic collection interfaces, as well as a number of useful sorting and searching algorithms. 

This talk provides a road map of the organization and features of the JCF to help you jump-start your introduction to the Framework. Plenty of sample code will be provided to the attendees to encourage them to start using Framework and resist the urge to re-implement existing functionality. 

Ray Toal is an Associate Professor at Loyola Marymount University where he has been teaching since 1986.  He is also a senior developer at Ticketmaster Online - CitySearch where he co-architected the company's first on-line city guide product and is currently working on graphic design tools and infrastructure for the current city guides. 
He is also Chair of the Los Angeles Chapter, ACM.

Dr. Toal announced that the talk would present the overall organization and examples of the use of the Java Collections Framework (JCF) so that programmers would be able to (1) start using the framework right away and (2) get rid of tons of poorly commented, under-tested, non-standard collection classes that defy large scale reuse.  He did not recommend throwing away old code that works, but suggests that there is a very good argument for not reusing bad old code in new applications. 

He referred to Java as an enormously popular, buzzword-compliant language for the 1990s and beyond.  "Buzz-word compliant" reflects the current popularity of the language.  It consists of a base language and a "Core API".  Other languages would call the "Core API" a "standard library".  The Java "Core API" consists of 59 packages which covers language support, utilities, input/output, graphics, graphical user interfaces, networking, concurrency and distribution, security, and database connectivity.  The Java attitude was "dump everything you can into the standard library". 

Dr. Toal followed with a description of a Collection as an object which contains other objects and consists of sets, sequences, hierarchies and networks.  The collections are usually described by interfaces.  The JCF consists of collection interfaces, collection implementations, algorithms and infrastructure.  The infrastructure consists of iterators, ordering and exception handling.  Design goals are to stay small and simple, and to provide interoperability among reasonable representations. 

He went into considerable detail on how things worked during his presentation that included a number of detailed viewgraph slides.  He concluded with the advice to use the new collections in all of your new work, but do port old code if it is feasible. 

The way to become good at using the new collections is to: 

• Read the on-line "Collections Framework Overview", the on-line "Annotated Outline of the Collections Framework" and the "Collections Framework FAQ". 
• Do the collections trail on the on-line Java tutorial.
• Read the on-line API reference for javautil and write tons of code. 
• [See Java SDK Website, Webmon]

You may contact Dr. Toal by e-mail at rtoal@csc.eng.lmu.edu. 
You can get the viewgraphs for this talk and some code samples at: ftp://cse.eng.lmu.edu/rtoal/talks/jcf.zip.  The slides are in PowerPoint format. 

Mike Walsh, LA ACM Secretary