Lesson: Generics

by Gilad Bracha

Introduced in J2SE 5.0, this long-awaited enhancement to the type system allows a type or method to operate on objects of various types while providing compile-time type safety. It adds compile-time type safety to the Collections Framework and eliminates the drudgery of casting.

Introduction
Defining Simple Generics
Generics and Subtyping
Wildcards
Generic Methods
Interoperating with Legacy Code
The Fine Print
Class Literals as Runtime-Type Tokens
More Fun with Wildcards
Converting Legacy Code to Use Generics
Acknowledgements