A colleague mentioned that he heard about a lightweight collection which would automatically page out to disk when it\'s contents got too full - but he couldn\'t remember th
Well, the only tools I know that has this kind of features are the prevalence systems : prevayler and space4j. Although their interface will seems weird to you at first, they are however quite simple to use and offer a convenient feature set.
MapDB (mapdb.org) is a library that supports disk based collections: Sets, Queues and Maps.
You can choose yourself when to persist it do disk or just persist on every update.
It also supports caching so all your items will be on disk but some cached in memory.