A DESCRIPTION OF THE REQUEST :
Collator (RuleBasedCollator?) does not check the compared strings for == before going into the complex rules for comparison.

JUSTIFICATION :
It seems silly to compare every character of a string to itself to determine what will amount to equality. Collator .getInstance() is called from TableRowSorter for all String sorting. JTables do often have duplicated data. The test program shows a significant speed increase. Although Collator is still very slow compared to String.compateTo() or String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER. I assume this is because of Unicode support. It would be great if the US/English Collator was as fast as String.compateTo().

EXPECTED VERSUS ACTUAL BEHAVIOR :
EXPECTED -
Collator should check for == before moving on to the complicated comparisons.

---------- BEGIN SOURCE ----------
package ScaleModels;

import java.text.Collator;
import java.util.ArrayList;
import java.util.Collections;
import java.util.Comparator;

public class CollatorTest {

/**
* @param args
*/
public static void main(String[] args) {

System.out.println("ComparableComparator Based Sort:");
float startTime = System.nanoTime();
Collections.sort(makeStateList());
float endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println("Total Elapsed Time: " + (endTime - startTime));

System.out.println("\nString.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER Based Sort:");
startTime = System.nanoTime();
Collections.sort(makeStateList(), String.CASE_INSENSITIVE_ORDER);
endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println("Total Elapsed Time: " + (endTime - startTime));

System.out.println("\nCollator w/ == check Based Sort:");
startTime = System.nanoTime();
Collections.sort(makeStateList(), compareTestEq);
endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println("Total Elapsed Time: " + (endTime - startTime));

System.out.println("\nCollator Based Sort:");
startTime = System.nanoTime();
Collections.sort(makeStateList(), Collator.getInstance());
endTime = System.nanoTime();
System.out.println("Total Elapsed Time: " + (endTime - startTime));
}

private static ArrayList<String> makeStateList() {
String state1 = "Mississippi";
String state2 = "New Mexico";
String state3 = "New Jersey";

ArrayList<String> listOfStates = new ArrayList<String>();
for (int i = 0; i < 100000; i++) {
switch (i % 3) {
case 1:
listOfStates.add(state1);
break;
case 2:
listOfStates.add(state2);
break;
case 3:
listOfStates.add(state3);
break;
}
}
return listOfStates;
}

private static Comparator<String> compareTestEq = new Comparator<String>() {

private Comparator<Object> base = Collator.getInstance();

@Override
public int compare(String o1, String o2) {
if (o1 == o2) {
return 0;
}
return base.compare(o1, o2);
}

};

}

---------- END SOURCE ----------

CUSTOMER SUBMITTED WORKAROUND :
private Comparator<String> compareTestEq = new Comparator<String>(){

@Override
public int compare(String o1, String o2) {
if(o1 == o2){
return 0;
}
return Collator.getInstance().compare(o1, o2);
}

};