As such, I am finally taking the time to dig into some of the newer Java features. Annotations are one item that was introduced with JDK 1.5 (or I guess its called Java 5 now) that I haven't made up my mind about yet.
Annotations, simply put, are a facility within Java for providing meta-data about code. From what I can tell so far, there are a couple different flavors (or uses) for this meta-data:
- documentation (acting essentially as a form of structured comments within the source code)
- compiler information (to provide a little clearer instructions to the compiler about how to handle the code - things like @Deprecated, @Override, @SuppressWarnings are all pretty clear in what they are telling the compiler)
- specialized processing (I suspect that this will more likely be used by frameworks, etc.)
In fact, my main exposure to annotations so far are from the Spring documentation (can you tell that I'm a fan of Spring?) It seems to be a way to remove some of the restrictions based on naming conventions, as well as a means of simplifying the XML configuration files (which I admit can get cumbersome).
I can see some advantages for using annotations, but I can also see it getting easy to mix in environment specific or configuration information that really shouldn't be embedded in the code.
More to come on this topic, but to answer the question posed in the title of this blog, I suspect its going to be like many other technologies - has some benefits when used properly, but can be easily abused (or used for the wrong reason).
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