Mark, I am sure you know this, but I am posting this for the benefit of others who might not.<p>For literal maps, I tend to use double brace initialization style. It is more verbose than languages with direct literal support for maps and creates an extra anonymous class, but it keeps the map in a single syntactic construct. For lists, I use Arrays.asList(a,b,c) style; if you static import the method it reads nicely as-list-a-b-c.