Java Vector is Obsolete

Today I was working with a unit test class for my Google Summer of Code project. Launching the test raised a concurrency exception due to me using ContiPerf to check the performance of some methods. It’s a situation that, given the piece of code tested, would not usually happen.

But seldom doesn’t equal never, so I proceeded to hunt the source of the error to fix it. The issue was a List that was being accessed via an iterator. The concrete implementation was an ArrayList, and I though I had cracked open the issue. I still remember from my SCJP that Vector is the class to use when you want a List that supports concurrency in Java.

So I replace it, compile the code, everything seems perfect and… wait a second. Netbeans is marking the line with an exclamation mark, let me check… Vector is deprecated?? What’s going on?

Yes, after a bit of Goggling it seems that Vector is deprecated. The main reason is that Vector does a synchronization per operation. That means you probably need a lock in the vector itself to avoid other threads to change it, as usually you are more interested in a lock for a series of operations, not in a lock for a specific operation.

Vector had not such good performance in its role, so it has been replaced. By who? Welcome the new kid in the block, Collection.synchronizedList. This is a method that takes a List as argument and will return a List with full synchronization whose data is baked by the list you provided.

You still need to use a lock if you use an iterator over the list, but for other operations the returned list will be thread safe.

Warning: use the list returned by the method, not the one you provided!

An example taken from the official JavaDoc:

List syncList = Collections.synchronizedList(new ArrayList());

//any operation using syncList will be thread safe
synchronized(syncList) {

  // Iterator must be in synchronized block
  Iterator i = suncList.iterator();
  while (i.hasNext()) {
    foo(i.next());
  }

}

That’s all. If you were using Vector (as I did until now):

• Install Netbeans 6.9 so it will warn you the next time
• Refactor your code. You will benefit from safer and more efficient code.