Navigating Java Collections

As a followup to a posting a while back two articles about SortedSet and SortedMap made easier and the interfaces they implement, NavigableSet and NavigableMap. They are implemented by skip lists, Concurrent Skipt List Set and Concurrent Skip List Map.

The first article describes in more detail the poll, iteration and LHCF (lower (L), higher (H), ceiling (C) and floor (F)) methods. The later is useful returning elements in a sorted map less than, greather than, less than or equal to and greater than or equal to.

The second article, notes the lack of returning subsets based on values rather than keys: "The disadvantage with NavigableMap is that the subMap method has no provision for returning a map based on a range of values rather than on keys. Therefore, implementing something similar to database views is laborious."

The thing to remember with these skip list data structures is: "Iterators are weakly consistent, returning elements reflecting the state of the map at some point at or since the creation of the iterator."

Also, there's a recent article about being able to hotpatch in Java 6 (which Symantec Visual Cafe was doing back in 1997). Visual Cafe was an excellent IDE in its day, where many IDEs are still catching up although it was behind in things like refactoring.