Among the new features available (enhanced for loop, generics) in J2SE 5.0 (or 1.5, or Tiger) is the annotations functionality. I have always been hoping to come across simple introduction to such stuff and it came in this issue’s Tech Tips.
Annotations allow us to associate metadata with program elements: metadata is information that describe the program elements, and the elements may be methods or member variables in a class. Annotations are defined using a @xxx tag before the element.
The most common and obvious use is the @Deprecated tag. This tag declares the method as deprecated: it is outdated and kept for backward-compatibility. When the method is called from another class, a warning will be generated.
Other annotations defined in Tiger are @Override and @SuppressWarnings. @Override insists that you are overriding a method in case of a typo or wrong method signature, similar to C#’s Overrides modifier. @SuppressWarnings will tell the compiler not to tell you about certain warnings such as deprecation or unchecked casts in the method. It can be used with some options, such as @SuppressWarnings(“fallthrough”). This looks a lot like .Net’s annotations.
In addition, the tip mentioned that custom annotations may be defined, probably something like XDoclet. That could be something else I could learn in the future. The tip also contains a link to a book “Effective Java Programming Language Guide” by Joshua Bloch, which contains 57 Java tips. Well likely could be the next tip review here.