Mimicking a circular buffer

Today I needed a Java collection having some non-standard properties. I wanted to continuously iterate over the collection, pretty much like you would over a circular buffer. This alone would be simple enough to implement with any Java List I guess but I also wanted to be able to remove elements from the Collection while going through it. I could have written my own linked list and unlinked the elements that I wanted to remove while cycling through the list. However I wasn't really interested in adding a custom linked list to our project just for this specific purpose. Unfortunately the remove method of the LinkedList in Java takes an index which implies that you cannot iterate through the list using a for-each loop. If you use a for loop, the control variables have to be adapted after removing elements - so the code becomes more complex.

Google Guava to the rescue. They have this nice utility class Iterators. The cycle method in Iterators returns a indefinitely looping Iterator for any Iterable that is given as argument. This would give me the behavior of the ring buffer and, because it was an Iterator, I was able to remove elements from the underlying collection. The loop would stop if the Collection was exhausted. Pretty neat.