Chapter 8: Holding your objects

It’s a fairly simple program that has only a fixed quantity of objects with known
lifetimes. In general, your programs will always be creating new objects at a variety
of times that will be known only while the program is running. In addition, you
won’t know until run-time the quantity or even the exact type of the objects you
need. To solve the general programming problem, you need to create any number of
objects, anytime, anywhere. This chapter explores in depth the tools that Java
supplies to hold objects while you’re working with them: the simple arrays and
more sophisticated collections (data structures) such as Vector and Hashtable.
Finally, the new and improved Java 1.2 collections library is explored in depth.