Queue

Class Overview

A collection designed for holding elements prior to processing. Besides basic Collection operations, queues provide additional insertion, extraction, and inspection operations. Each of these methods exists in two forms: one throws an exception if the operation fails, the other returns a special value (either null or false, depending on the operation). The latter form of the insert operation is designed specifically for use with capacity-restricted Queue implementations; in most implementations, insert operations cannot fail.

Queues typically, but do not necessarily, order elements in a FIFO (first-in-first-out) manner. Among the exceptions are priority queues, which order elements according to a supplied comparator, or the elements' natural ordering, and LIFO queues (or stacks) which order the elements LIFO (last-in-first-out). Whatever the ordering used, the head of the queue is that element which would be removed by a call to remove() or poll(). In a FIFO queue, all new elements are inserted at the tail of the queue. Other kinds of queues may use different placement rules. Every Queue implementation must specify its ordering properties.

The offer method inserts an element if possible, otherwise returning false. This differs from the Collection.add method, which can fail to add an element only by throwing an unchecked exception. The offer method is designed for use when failure is a normal, rather than exceptional occurrence, for example, in fixed-capacity (or "bounded") queues.

The remove() and poll() methods remove and return the head of the queue. Exactly which element is removed from the queue is a function of the queue's ordering policy, which differs from implementation to implementation. The remove() and poll() methods differ only in their behavior when the queue is empty: the remove() method throws an exception, while the poll() method returns null.

The element() and peek() methods return, but do not remove, the head of the queue.

The Queue interface does not define the blocking queue methods, which are common in concurrent programming. These methods, which wait for elements to appear or for space to become available, are defined in the BlockingQueue interface, which extends this interface.

Queue implementations generally do not allow insertion of null elements, although some implementations, such as LinkedList, do not prohibit insertion of null. Even in the implementations that permit it, null should not be inserted into a Queue, as null is also used as a special return value by the poll method to indicate that the queue contains no elements.

Queue implementations generally do not define element-based versions of methods equals and hashCode but instead inherit the identity based versions from class Object, because element-based equality is not always well-defined for queues with the same elements but different ordering properties.

Summary

[Expand] Inherited Methods
From interface java.lang.Iterable abstract Iterator<T> iterator() Returns an Iterator for the elements in this object.
From interface java.util.Collection abstract boolean add(E object) Attempts to add object to the contents of this Collection (optional). abstract boolean addAll(Collection<? extends E> collection) Attempts to add all of the objects contained in Collection to the contents of this Collection (optional). abstract void clear() Removes all elements from this Collection, leaving it empty (optional). abstract boolean contains(Object object) Tests whether this Collection contains the specified object. abstract boolean containsAll(Collection<?> collection) Tests whether this Collection contains all objects contained in the specified Collection. abstract boolean equals(Object object) Compares the argument to the receiver, and returns true if they represent the same object using a class specific comparison. abstract int hashCode() Returns an integer hash code for the receiver. abstract boolean isEmpty() Returns if this Collection contains no elements. abstract Iterator<E> iterator() Returns an instance of Iterator that may be used to access the objects contained by this Collection. abstract boolean remove(Object object) Removes one instance of the specified object from this Collection if one is contained (optional). abstract boolean removeAll(Collection<?> collection) Removes all occurrences in this Collection of each object in the specified Collection (optional). abstract boolean retainAll(Collection<?> collection) Removes all objects from this Collection that are not also found in the Collection passed (optional). abstract int size() Returns a count of how many objects this Collection contains. abstract <T> T[] toArray(T[] array) Returns an array containing all elements contained in this Collection. abstract Object[] toArray() Returns a new array containing all elements contained in this Collection.