The finalize method is called by the garbage collector, just before releasing the object’s memory. It is normally advised to release resources held by the object inside the finalize method.

The purpose of garbage collection is to identify and discard those objects that are no longer needed by the application, in order for the resources to be reclaimed and reused.

Enumeration is twice as fast as compared to an Iterator and uses very less memory. However, the Iterator is much safer compared to Enumeration, because other threads are not able to modify the collection object that is currently traversed by the iterator. Also, Iteratorsallow the caller to remove elements from the underlying collection, something which is not possible with Enumerations.

The Big-O notation simply describes how well an algorithm scales or performs in the worst case scenario as the number of elements in a data structure increases. The Big-O notation can also be used to describe other behavior such as memory consumption. Since the collection classes are actually data structures, we usually use the Big-O notation to chose the best implementation to use, based on time, memory and performance. Big-O notation can give a good indication about performance for large amounts of data.

Java Collections Framework provides a well designed set of interfaces and classes that support operations on a collections of objects. The most basic interfaces that reside in the Java Collections Framework are:

Collection, which represents a group of objects known as its elements.

Set, which is a collection that cannot contain duplicate elements.

List, which is an ordered collection and can contain duplicate elements.

Map, which is an object that maps keys to values and cannot contain duplicate keys.

- A process is an execution of a program, while a Thread is a single execution sequence within a process.

- A process can contain multiple threads. A Thread is sometimes called a lightweight process.

There are three ways that can be used in order for a Thread to be created:

A class may extend the Thread class.

A class may implement the Runnable interface.

An application can use the Executor framework, in order to create a thread pool.

The Runnable interface is preferred, as it does not require an object to inherit the Thread class. In case your application design requires multiple inheritance, only interfaces can help you. Also, the thread pool is very efficient and can be implemented and used very easily.

When an object is passed by value, this means that a copy of the object is passed. Thus, even if changes are made to that object, it doesn’t affect the original value. 

When an object is passed by reference, this means that the actual object is not passed, rather a reference of the object is passed. Thus, any changes made by the external method, are also reflected in all places.