Concurrent Collection Classes

A collection of Application Programming Interfaces that deal particularly with concurrent operations. These classes are alternative to the Java Collection Framework and provides similar functionality although with additional support towards Concurrency.

The ultimate goal of this collection is to allow many threads access to resources in a synchronised manor.

Concurrent Collections in Java

According to Oracle.com and as quoted below: 

"The java.util.concurrent package includes a number of additions to the Java Collections Framework. These are most easily categorized by the collection interfaces provided:

• BlockingQueue defines a first-in-first-out data structure that blocks or times out when you attempt to add to a full queue, or retrieve from an empty queue.
• ConcurrentMap is a subinterface of java.util.Map that defines useful atomic operations. These operations remove or replace a key-value pair only if the key is present, or add a key-value pair only if the key is absent. Making these operations atomic helps avoid synchronization. The standard general-purpose implementation of ConcurrentMap is ConcurrentHashMap, which is a concurrent analog of HashMap.
• ConcurrentNavigableMap is a subinterface of ConcurrentMap that supports approximate matches. The standard general-purpose implementation of ConcurrentNavigableMap is ConcurrentSkipListMap, which is a concurrent analog of TreeMap.

All of these collections help avoid Memory Consistency Errors by defining a happens-before relationship between an operation that adds an object to the collection with subsequent operations that access or remove that object."