A Guide to Understand Java Generics with Examples

Java Generics

Java Generic methods and generic classes enable programmers to specify, with a single method declaration, a set of related methods, or with a single class declaration, a set of related types, respectively. Generics also provide compile–time type safety that allows programmers to catch invalid types at compile time. This reference will take you through simple and practical methods using Java Generics.

The Java Generics programming is introduced in J2SE 5 to deal with type–safe objects. It makes the code stable by detecting the bugs at compile time.

Before generics, we can store any type of objects in the collection, i.e., non–generic. Now generics force the java programmer to store a specific type of objects.

It would be nice if we could write a single sort method that could sort the elements in an Integer array, a String array, or an array of any type that supports ordering.

Java Generic methods and generic classes enable programmers to specify, with a single method declaration, a set of related methods, or with a single class declaration, a set of related types, respectively.

Generics also provide compile–time type safety that allows programmers to catch invalid types at compile time.

Using Java Generic concept, we might write a generic method for sorting an array of objects, then invoke the generic method with Integer arrays, Double arrays, String arrays and so on, to sort the array elements.