Importent questions.

Collection are used to store, retrive , manippulate and communicate aggregate data.

A collection is a group of data manipulate as a single object.

few classes for collections: Vector, Stack, Hashtable, Array.

What are the basic interfaces of Java Collections Framework?

Collection is the root of the collection hierarchy. A collection represents a group of objects known as its elements. The Java platform doesn’t provide any direct implementations of this interface.

Set is a collection that cannot contain duplicate elements. This interface models the mathematical set abstraction and is used to represent sets, such as the deck of cards.

List is an ordered collection and can contain duplicate elements. You can access any element from it’s index. List is more like array with dynamic length.

A Map is an object that maps keys to values. A map cannot contain duplicate keys: Each key can map to at most one value.

Some other interfaces are Queue, Dequeue, Iterator, SortedSet, SortedMap and ListIterator.

What are the difference between hashmap and hashtable?

1. Hashtable is synchronized, whereas HashMap is not. This makes HashMap better for non-threaded applications, as unsynchronized Objects typically perform better than synchronized ones.
2. Hashtable does not allow null keys or values. HashMap allows one null key and any number of null values.
3. One of HashMap's subclasses is LinkedHashMap, so in the event that you'd want predictable iteration order (which is insertion order by default), you could easily swap out the HashMap for a LinkedHashMap. This wouldn't be as easy if you were using Hashtable.