Chapter 18, Problem 1RE

Program Plan Intro

Java Generics:

• Java generic classes and generic methods allow the programmers to specify, with a single class declaration, a set of related types and with a single method declaration, a set of related methods.
• Using the concept of generics, user can write a generic method sort for sorting objects array then call this method with String arrays, Integer arrays, Double arrays and more for sorting the elements of the array.
• The user can create a single generic method and call it with arguments of different types.
• The compiler handles the methods calls appropriately based on the types of arguments passed to the generic method.

Explanation of Solution

Type Parameters:

• Type parameters are naming conventions and are important in java generic.
• The type parameters are used to keep the type safety especially when using the java collections like, “ArrayList”, “HashMap” and so on.
  • For example, the array list is not restricted to accept any particular set of data. So, it accepts any kind of data in it, even though the user is not indented to give these types of values.
  • So, it needs to be controlled and the type parameters help to keep the type safety of block of code.
  • The type parameters are the names like, “K”, “E” are given at the time of declaring the class or methods, then at the time of defining, the type of these parameters are specified clearly.
• The common type parameters are,
  • “T”-Type
  • “E”-Element
  • “K”-Key
  • “N”-Number
  • “V”-Value
• Each type parameter has their own purpose like, the type “K” is used represent some keys and the type “N” is used to represent some numbers.
• The type parameters can be used as the arguments of a method, return type of a method, type of class and so on.
• For a generic class or method, the user can give different combinations of type parameters as”<K, N>”.
• Then the user need to specify what is the type of these type parameters specifically when defining class members like, “ArrayList”, “HashMap” and so on.