What does "generalizes the tag object's storage" mean?

Question

Hi, 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";