Item 33: Consider typesafe heterogeneous containers

 The idea is to parameterize the key instead of the container.

consider a Favorites class that allows its clients to store and retrieve a favorite instance of arbitrarily many types. 
The Class object for the type will play the part of the parameterized key. The reason this works is that class Class is generic. The type of a class literal is not simply Class, but Class<T>. For example, String.class is of type Class<String>, and Integer.class is of type Class<Integer>. 
When a class literal is passed among methods to communicate both compile-time and runtime type information, it is called a type token [Bracha04].
// Typesafe heterogeneous container pattern - API
public class Favorites {
    public <T> void putFavorite(Class<T> type, T instance);
    public <T> T getFavorite(Class<T> type);
}

// Typesafe heterogeneous container pattern - client
public static void main(String[] args) {
    Favorites f = new Favorites();
    f.putFavorite(String.class, "Java");
    f.putFavorite(Integer.class, 0xcafebabe);
    f.putFavorite(Class.class, Favorites.class);
    String favoriteString = f.getFavorite(String.class);
    int favoriteInteger = f.getFavorite(Integer.class);
    Class<?> favoriteClass = f.getFavorite(Class.class);
    System.out.printf("%s %x %s%n", favoriteString,
        favoriteInteger, favoriteClass.getName());
}

A Favorites instance is typesafe: it will never return an Integer when you ask it for a String. It is also heterogeneous: unlike an ordinary map, all the keys are of different types. Therefore, we call Favorites a typesafe heterogeneous container.

The implementation of Favorites is surprisingly tiny. Here it is, in its entirety:

// Typesafe heterogeneous container pattern - implementation
public class Favorites {
    private Map<Class<?>, Object> favorites = new HashMap<>();

    public <T> void putFavorite(Class<T> type, T instance) {
        favorites.put(Objects.requireNonNull(type), instance);
    }

    public <T> T getFavorite(Class<T> type) {

return type.cast(favorites.get(type));
    }
}

This means that every key can have a differentparameterized type: one can be Class<String>, the next Class<Integer>, and so on. That’s where the heterogeneity comes from.

public class Class<T> {
    T cast(Object obj);
}

// Achieving runtime type safety with a dynamic cast
public <T> void putFavorite(Class<T> type, T instance) {
    favorites.put(type, type.cast(instance));
}

There are collection wrappers in java.util.Collections that play the same trick. They are called checkedSet, checkedList, checkedMap, and so forth. Their static factories take a Class object (or two) in addition to a collection (or map). The static factories 

The second limitation of the Favorites class is that it cannot be used on a non-reifiable type (Item 28). In other words, you can store your favorite String or String[], but not your favorite List<String>. your program won’t compile. The reason is that you can’t get a Class object for List<String>. The class literal List<String>.class is a syntax error, and it’s a good thing, too. List<String>and List<Integer> share a single Class object, which is List.class. It would wreak havoc with the internals of a Favorites object if the “type literals” List<String>.class and List<Integer>.class were legal and returned the same object reference. There is no entirely satisfactory workaround for this limitation.

The type tokens used by Favorites are unbounded: getFavorite and put-Favorite accept any Class object. Sometimes you may need to limit the types that can be passed to a method. This can be achieved with a bounded type token, which is simply a type token that places a bound on what type can be represented, using a bounded type parameter (Item 30) or a bounded wildcard (Item 31).

ublic <T extends Annotation>
    T getAnnotation(Class<T> annotationType);

The argument, annotationType, is a bounded type token representing an annotation type. The method returns the element’s annotation of that type, if it has one, or null, if it doesn’t. In essence, an annotated element is a typesafe heterogeneous container whose keys are annotation types.

Suppose you have an object of type Class<?> and you want to pass it to a method that requires a bounded type token, such as getAnnotation. You could cast the object to Class<? extends Annotation>, but this cast is unchecked, so it would generate a compile-time warning (Item 27). Luckily, class Class provides an instance method that performs this sort of cast safely (and dynamically). The method is called asSubclass, and it casts the Class object on which it is called to represent a subclass of the class represented by its argument. If the cast succeeds, the method returns its argument; if it fails, it throws a ClassCastException.

Here’s how you use the asSubclass method to read an annotation whose type is unknown at compile time. This method compiles without error or warning:

// Use of asSubclass to safely cast to a bounded type token

static Annotation getAnnotation(AnnotatedElement element,
                                String annotationTypeName) {
    Class<?> annotationType = null; // Unbounded type token
    try {
        annotationType = Class.forName(annotationTypeName);
    } catch (Exception ex) {
        throw new IllegalArgumentException(ex);
    }
    return element.getAnnotation(
        annotationType.asSubclass(Annotation.class));
}

In summary, the normal use of generics, exemplified by the collections APIs, restricts you to a fixed number of type parameters per container. You can get around this restriction by placing the type parameter on the key rather than the container. You can use Class objects as keys for such typesafe heterogeneous containers. A Class object used in this fashion is called a type token. You can also use a custom key type. For example, you could have a DatabaseRow type representing a database row (the container), and a generic type Column<T> as its key.