Java Garage

Wrapper Classes

You can't call a method on a Java primitive, such as an int or a double. And sometimes that's a problem because you would like to be able to. Sometimes, you need to hold a list of these kinds of values, and you want to use the classes in the Java Collections Framework; the problem here is that none of those data structures, such as ArrayList, Hashtable, or Vector, will hold primitive types. They only hold objects.

So what's a girl to do? Use the wrapper classes that come with the Java API. There is a class in the java.lang package that corresponds to each of the primitive types. Table 11-1 shows these classes.

11-1. The Primitive Wrapper Classes

WRAPPER	PRIMITIVE
Boolean	boolean
Byte	byte
Short	short
Character	char
Integer	int
Long	long
Float ...