As a simple example of this approach, 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].
