builder for HashMap

Question

There is no such thing for HashMaps, but you can create an ImmutableMap with a builder:

final Map<String, Integer> m = ImmutableMap.<String, Integer>builder().
      put("a", 1).
      put("b", 2).
      build();

And if you need a mutable map, you can just feed that to the HashMap constructor.

final Map<String, Integer> m = Maps.newHashMap(
    ImmutableMap.<String, Integer>builder().
        put("a", 1).
        put("b", 2).
        build());

Not quite a builder, but using an initializer:

Map<String, String> map = new HashMap<String, String>() {{
    put("a", "1");
    put("b", "2");
}};

This is similar to the accepted answer, but a little cleaner, in my view:

ImmutableMap.of("key1", val1, "key2", val2, "key3", val3);

There are several variations of the above method, and they are great for making static, unchanging, immutable maps.

Since Java 9 Map interface contains:

• Map.of(k1,v1, k2,v2, ..)
• Map.ofEntries(Map.entry(k1,v1), Map.entry(k2,v2), ..).

Limitations of those factory methods are that they:

• can't hold nulls as keys and/or values (if you need to store nulls take a look at other answers)
• produce immutable maps

---

If we need mutable map (like HashMap) we can use its copy-constructor and let it copy content of map created via Map.of(..)

Map<Integer, String> map = new HashMap<>( Map.of(1,"a", 2,"b", 3,"c") );

Here is a very simple one ...

public class FluentHashMap<K, V> extends java.util.HashMap<K, V> {
  public FluentHashMap<K, V> with(K key, V value) {
    put(key, value);
    return this;
  }

  public static <K, V> FluentHashMap<K, V> map(K key, V value) {
    return new FluentHashMap<K, V>().with(key, value);
  }
}

then

import static FluentHashMap.map;

HashMap<String, Integer> m = map("a", 1).with("b", 2);

See https://gist.github.com/culmat/a3bcc646fa4401641ac6eb01f3719065