Queue Implementations

The JavaTM Tutorial

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Trail: Collections
Lesson: Implementations

## Queue Implementations

> The `Queue` implementations are grouped into general-purpose and concurrent implementations.

> ### General-Purpose Queue Implementations

> As mentioned in the previous section, `LinkedList` implements the `Queue` interface, providing FIFO queue operations for `add`, `poll`, and so on.

> The `PriorityQueue` class is a priority queue based on the heap data structure. This queue orders elements according to an order specified at construction time, which can be the elements' natural order or the order implied by an explicit `Comparator`.

> The queue retrieval operations — `poll`, `remove` `peek`, and `element` — access the element at the head of the queue. The head of the queue is the least element with respect to the specified ordering. If multiple elements are tied for least value, the head is one of those elements; ties are broken arbitrarily.

> `PriorityQueue` and its iterator implement all the optional methods of the `Collection` and `Iterator` interfaces. The iterator provided in method `iterator` is not guaranteed to traverse the elements of the `PriorityQueue` in any particular order. If you need ordered traversal, consider using `Arrays.sort(pq.toArray())`.

> ### Concurrent Queue Implementations

> The `java.util.concurrent` package contains a set of synchronized `Queue` interfaces and classes. `BlockingQueue` extends `Queue` with operations that wait for the queue to become nonempty when retrieving an element and for space to become available in the queue when storing an element. This interface is implemented by the following classes:
> - `LinkedBlockingQueue` — an optionally bounded FIFO blocking queue backed by linked nodes
> - `ArrayBlockingQueue` — a bounded FIFO blocking queue backed by an array
> - `PriorityBlockingQueue` — an unbounded blocking priority queue backed by a heap
> - `DelayQueue` — a time-based scheduling queue backed by a heap
> - `SynchronousQueue` — a simple rendezvous mechanism that uses the `BlockingQueue` interface

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