First, there is no way to compare two objects of class Object, they need to have a way to get compared: this is implementing the interface Comparable. so you would need to change columns to be HashMap<String, Comparable>.
After that, you could add a comparing method to RowBean like this:
class RowBean {
private HashMap<String, Comparable> columns;
public int compare(String column, RowBean other) {
return columns.get(column).compareTo(other.columns.get(column));
}
}
And finally, to sort your list you could use an anonym Comparator, this way:
List<RowBean> list = new ArrayList<>();
final String sortingColumn = "myColumn";
Collections.sort(list, new Comparator<RowBean>() {
@Override
public int compare(RowBean o1, RowBean o2) {
return o1.compare(sortingColumn, o2);
}
});