Core Java™ 2 Volume II - Advanced Features, Seventh Edition

Chapter 13. Annotations

• Addition of Metadata to Programs

• An Example: Annotating Event Handlers

• Annotation Syntax

• Standard Annotations

• The apt Tool for Source-Level Annotation Processing

• Bytecode Engineering

Annotations are tags that you insert into your source code for processing by tools. The tags can be processed at the source level, or the compiler can include them in class files.

Annotations do not change the way in which your programs are compiled. (The JDK 5.0 compiler uses a couple of annotations to generate or suppress warnings, but it generates the same class files with or without the annotations. These annotations are simple and somewhat atypical since third parties can't add new annotations to the compiler.)

In order to benefit from annotations, ...