Generics in Java

Generics are a facility of generic programming that were added to the Java programming language in 2004 within J2SE 5.0. They allow "a type or method to operate on objects of various types while providing compile-time type safety." This feature specifies the type of objects stored in a Java Collection. In 1998, Philip Wadler created Generic Java, an extension to the Java language to support generic types. Generic Java was incorporated, with the addition of wildcards, into the official Java language version J2SE 5.0.