Chosing from Vectors, HashMaps or Arrays

Question

Hi All,
I have to decide on which of these to use for my problem. I want a Collection that holds values like
[Name, year of Birth]
["Tom", 1952]
["Dick", 1972]
["Harry", 1992]
.where the first element is a String type and its related element is an integer ...
the age old solution looks like using a 2-D array ... but in my case the list has to expand vertically and it could be possible that I have more data values laterally as well like "Age" field added up
["Tom",  1952, 53, ...... ]
.I am not able to make up my mind as to chosing between Vectors or Hashmaps or Lists for this situation .... I want to avoid usng a n-D array and instead use some of the features offered by Java ...
since I am relatively new to Java ... please explain why one should use a vector or a hashmap for this

Answer 1

1. Definitely not Vector, unless you need synchronization. Use ArrayList instead.
If your key is always the name, and the person may have many attributes, create a person class.
class Person
   String name;
   int YearOfBirth;
   String phoneNumber;
   //whatever 
}Put them in a HashMap with keys of name, and values of Person. Then if you want to add more attributes to Person, it is easy--your HashMap data structure won't change.
Map map = new HashMap();
map.put("Tom", new Person("Tom", 1952, "555-555-5555"));
//or, maybe better, so name isn't duplicated incorrectly:
Person person = new Person("Tom", 1952, "555-555-5555"));
map.put(person.getName(), person);