Question

could anyone please clarify the meaning of line generalizes the tag object’s storage of attributes in the following line of Head First Servlets & JSP (page no. 555):

One solution would be to put all of the attributes into a hashtable. This
generalizes the tag object’s storage
of attributes, but what about all
these setter methods? We can’t get rid
of them unless there’s a way to tell
the JSP engine to set the tag
attributes using a generic
interface.

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

“Generalizes” in this context means that you can write one function or one small piece of code that implements all of your cases rather than writing each case separately. I don’t have that book, but it looks like it replaces something like:

 String attr1;
 String attr2;
 String attr3;

with

 Hashtable<String, String> attributes;

That’s generalizing the storage — the code is meant to show a generic hashtable that maps strings to strings — you would use something like this

 attributes["attr1"] = "value";

The other code would be used something like this:

 attr1 = "value";