<p>What is the most straightforward way to create a hash table (or associative array...) in Java?  My google-fu has turned up a couple examples, but is there a standard way to do this?</p>

<p>And is there a way to populate the table with a list of key->value pairs without individually calling an add method on the object for each pair?</p>

```
```
import java.util.HashMap;

Map map = new HashMap();
```
```