Typesafe registry of key-value pairs
Have you ever seen or used this pattern of code: I've seen the above code and many variations of this pattern scattered all over the various java code bases I've read and it has always nagged me that although we have had the power of generics and the associated type-safety guarantees available at our fingertips for a long time now, this type of general registries of key-value pairs still involve this type of cast-heavy boilerplate. It stroke me then how often I have I seen just this pattern appear and re-appear so many times that I have all but stopped thinking about it.- "Of course, if you need an extensible registry of values, you use a Map of key-value pairs (or a Dictionary )" . And usually you either engineer your registry around same type of objects or you throw the generic typesafety out with a proverbial bathwater and map your keys (usually of the type String ) to values of type, well .. Object . Would'nt it be nice if we could actually ma...