When to use generic methods and when to use wild-card?

Question

I am reading about generic methods from OracleDocGenericMethod. I am pretty confused about the comparison when it says when to use wild-card and when to use generic methods.

Answer 1

As far as I understand, there is only one use case when wildcard is strictly needed (i.e. can express something that you can not express using explicit type parameters). This is when you need to specify a lower bound.

Apart from that however wildcards serve to write more concise code, as described by the following statements in the document you mention:

Generic methods allow type parameters to be used to express dependencies among the types of one or more arguments to a method and/or its return type. If there isn't such a dependency, a generic method should not be used.

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Using wildcards is clearer and more concise than declaring explicit type parameters, and should therefore be preferred whenever possible.

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Wildcards also have the advantage that they can be used outside of method signatures, as the types of fields, local variables and arrays.