The Vector class implements a growable array of
objects. Like an array, it contains components that can be
accessed using an integer index. However, the size of a
Vector can grow or shrink as needed to accommodate
adding and removing items after the Vector has been created.
Each vector tries to optimize storage management by maintaining a
capacity and a capacityIncrement. The
capacity is always at least as large as the vector
size; it is usually larger because as components are added to the
vector, the vector's storage increases in chunks the size of
capacityIncrement. An application can increase the
capacity of a vector before inserting a large number of
components; this reduces the amount of incremental reallocation.
The iterators returned by this class's iterator and
listIterator methods are fail-fast:
if the vector is structurally modified at any time after the iterator is
created, in any way except through the iterator's own
remove or
add methods, 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
the elements method 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 List interface, making it a member of the
Java Collections Framework. Unlike the new collection
implementations, Vector is synchronized. If a thread-safe
implementation is not needed, it is recommended to use ArrayList in place of Vector.
extends
Collection, LinkedList