More Essential Classes

The Collections and Internationalization APIs are essential to most enterprise applications.
Collections

A collection (or container) is a single object that groups mulitple objects into a single object. Collections store, retrieve, and manipulate date, and transmit date from one method to another. Normally, collections represent data items that form a natural group such as names and addresses or resumes for a florist shop.
The Collections API consists of the APIs and a framework. A framework is a unified architecture for representing and manipulating collections independent of their representation details. The Collections API enables interoperability between unrelated APIs, encourages software reuse, and makes it easier to design, implement, or learn a new API.
In JDK 1.2, the Collections API has been changed and enhanced for increased power. There are two new core collection interfaces (SortedMap and SortedSet), one new concrete class (TreeSet), and ArraySet and ArrayMap were deleted from the API. See the API Enhancements document on the Collections Page for detailed information on the API changes.

Internationalization

The Internationalization APIs let you design an application so it can be adapted to different languages and regions without recompilation. The textual data such as messages and GUI component labels, and other culturally-dependent data such as dates and currencies are isolated from the rest of the application in sets of files where one set contains the text for a given language and region. For example, there might be a set of files for French and another set for Canadian French, and because the language code is specified at run time, the same application can be distributed to Canada and France with no modifications to the executable code. By isolating the text to be translated, you also save translation costs.
In JDK 1.2, changes to the Internationalization APIs include the addition of the Input Method Framework and a number of surface changes to the Text package that involved renaming and moving methods and changing the order of method parameters for simplification.

Features Roadmap