Creating a factory method in Java that doesn't rely on if-else

Question

Currently I have a method that acts as a factory based on a given String. For example:

public Animal createAnimal(String action)
{
    if (action.equals(\"M         


        

Answer 1

I haven't tried this, but could with create a Map with "Meow", etc as keys and (say) Cat.class as value.

Provide a static instance generation via an interface and call as

Animal classes.get("Meow").getInstance()