Another possibility is to use "typesafe heterogenuous containers" as described in Joshua Bloch, "Effective Java", 2nd edition and probably 3rd edition. The idea

Another possibility is to use "typesafe heterogenuous containers" as described in Joshua Bloch, "Effective Java", 2nd edition and probably 3rd edition. The idea is to use maps with specially constructed keys, that give you type safe access to their accompanied values. That is better than completely untyped, you have a place to document stuff at the declaration of those keys and you can easily create runtime checks, that check for the presence of a set of well defined keys in the map. The fact that they are described in a Java book does not mean that they aren't a nice pattern in Scala and several other statically typed language with generics.