null object can be used as a key or as a value.
This class implements a hash table, which maps keys to values. Any non-object can be used as a key or as a value.
To successfully store and retrieve objects from a hashtable, the
objects used as keys must implement the hashCode
method and the equals method.
An instance of Hashtable has two parameters that affect its
performance: initial capacity and load factor. The
capacity is the number of buckets in the hash table, and the
initial capacity is simply the capacity at the time the hash table
is created. Note that the hash table is open: in the case of a “hash
collision”, a single bucket stores multiple entries, which must be searched
sequentially. The load factor is a measure of how full the hash
table is allowed to get before its capacity is automatically increased.
The initial capacity and load factor parameters are merely hints to
the implementation. The exact details as to when and whether the rehash
method is invoked are implementation-dependent.
Generally, the default load factor (.75) offers a good tradeoff between
time and space costs. Higher values decrease the space overhead but
increase the time cost to look up an entry (which is reflected in most
Hashtable operations, including get and put).
The initial capacity controls a tradeoff between wasted space and the
need for rehash operations, which are time-consuming.
No rehash operations will ever occur if the initial
capacity is greater than the maximum number of entries the
Hashtable will contain divided by its load factor. However,
setting the initial capacity too high can waste space.
If many entries are to be made into a Hashtable,
creating it with a sufficiently large capacity may allow the
entries to be inserted more efficiently than letting it perform
automatic rehashing as needed to grow the table.
This example creates a hashtable of numbers. It uses the names of
the numbers as keys:
Hashtable<String, Integer> numbers
= new Hashtable<String, Integer>();
numbers.put("one", 1);
numbers.put("two", 2);
numbers.put("three", 3);
To retrieve a number, use the following code:
Integer n = numbers.get("two");
if (n != null) {
System.out.println("two = " + n);
}
The iterators returned by the iterator method of the collections
returned by all of this class’s “collection view methods” are
fail-fast: if the Hashtable is structurally modified at any time
after the iterator is created, in any way except through the iterator’s own
remove method, the iterator will throw a ConcurrentModificationException. Thus, in the face of concurrent
modification, the iterator fails quickly and cleanly, rather than risking
arbitrary, non-deterministic behavior at an undetermined time in the future.
The Enumerations returned by Hashtable’s keys and elements methods are
not fail-fast.
Note that the fail-fast behavior of an iterator cannot be guaranteed
as it is, generally speaking, impossible to make any hard guarantees in the
presence of unsynchronized concurrent modification. Fail-fast iterators
throw ConcurrentModificationException on a best-effort basis.
Therefore, it would be wrong to write a program that depended on this
exception for its correctness: the fail-fast behavior of iterators
should be used only to detect bugs.
As of the Java 2 platform v1.2, this class was retrofitted to
implement the Map interface, making it a member of the
Java Collections Framework. Unlike the new collection
implementations, Hashtable is synchronized. If a
thread-safe implementation is not needed, it is recommended to use
HashMap in place of Hashtable. If a thread-safe
highly-concurrent implementation is desired, then it is recommended
to use ConcurrentHashMap in place of
Hashtable.
