Advantages of collection based data-structures

August 5th, 2008 • AS3-Collection-Framework, Actionscript 3.0

In many situations programmers are forced to manipulate data structures.
These could be indexed based retrieval of data as well as sequential followed traversing. These structures are coded at least a hundret times in different projects.

To follow the fundamental thoughts of object oriented programming, there necessary has to be a common data-structure that ensure the maintainability and reusability of software.
Collection classes such as sets and lists are ideal candidates for software reuse and can therefore play an important role in object-oriented class libraries[EMKS98].

When you take a look at the core flash data libraries, you couldn't find such a collection.
This was the key fact that brought me up to replicate JAVA's Collection Framework to Actionscript 3.0.

Of course this wasn't a copy-paste scenario...

There were a couple of things in the Collection Framework that were a bit "overengineered". For example the IDeque interface. This is a swiss-knife analogue interface that has the functionality of an LIFO-/FIFO-Queue.

In the rebuild I spitted this functionality into two seperate interfaces. IStack is a LIFO-based collection and IQueue is FIFO-based.

The following uml-diagram shows the dependencies between the collection-interfaces:

References:

[EMKS98] M. Evered, G. Menger, J. L. Keedy and A. Schmolitzky, A Useable Collection Framework for Java, 16th IASTED Intl. Conf. on Applied Informatics, Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1998

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