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Queue Implementations

The Queue implementations are grouped into general-purpose and concurrent implementations.

General-Purpose Queue Implementations

As mentioned in the previous section, LinkedList implements the Queue interface, providing first-in-first-out queue operations for add, poll, and so on.

The PriorityQueue class is a priority queue based on the heap data structure. This queue orders elements according to an order specified at construction time, which can the elements' natural order or the order implied by an explicit Comparator.

The queue retrieval operations poll, remove, peek, and element access the element at the head of the queue. The head of the queue is the least element with respect to the specified ordering. If multiple elements are tied for least value, the head is one of those elements; ties are broken arbitrarily.

PriorityQueue and its iterator implement all of the optional methods of the Collection and Iterator interfaces. The Iterator provided in method iterator is not guaranteed to traverse the elements of the PriorityQueue in any particular order. If you need ordered traversal, consider using Arrays.sort(pq.toArray()).

Concurrent Queue Implementations

The java.util.concurrent package contains a set of synchronized queue interfaces and classes. BlockingQueue extends Queue with operations that wait for the queue to become non-empty when retrieving an element and that wait for space to become available in the queue when storing an element. This interface is implemented by the following classes:

• LinkedBlockingQueue, an optionally bounded FIFO blocking queue backed by linked nodes.
• ArrayBlockingQueue, a bounded FIFO blocking queue backed by an array.
• PriorityBlockingQueue, an unbounded blocking priority queue backed by a heap.
• DelayQueue, a time-based scheduling queue backed by a heap.
• SynchronousQueue, a simple rendezvous mechanism utilizing the BlockingQueue interface.

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