New in Java 9: Collection Factory Methods

One of the nice new things in Java 9 are Collection Factory Methods. In this article, I'll tell you about these new methods.

The what

If you have a small collection, with predefined elements, you usually do something like the following:

List<String> languages = new ArrayList<>();
newEmployees.add("Dutch");
newEmployees.add("English");
newEmployees.add("German");

While above code perfectly works, I think we can agree that it doesn't look that pretty. Firstly, we have to think about the implementation type we want to use for the List. Secondly, we need three statements to add an element and one to create a List. It's hard to do this as a field initializer in a class. All in all, it could be better.

Luckly, as of Java 9, it's actually better. We got Collection Factory Methods: List.of(), Set.of() and Map.of(). It's a nice and light-weight way to make collections with predefined elements.

The how

As of Java 9, we can do the following for a List:

List<String> languages.of("Dutch", "English", "German");

The method uses the best implementation of List for you, so you don't have to think about that.

The same applies for Set:

Set.of(1, 2, 3);

Note that Set doesn't provide any ordering guarantees.

And Map, with ofcourse keys and values:

Map.of("1", 1, "2", 2, "3", 3);

Also good-to-know

null values

If you would try to add an element that is null to a collection:

List.of(1, 2, null);

You'll get a NullPointerException. It's simply not allowed to add null values.

Immutable

All created collections are immutable. If you try to add a new element, you'll get a UnsupportedOperationException.