Adding Annotations

Summary

You’ve now seen how to use annotations and the APT utility to generate side files dynamically based on the presence of those annotations. You typically won’t need to write code to do such processing yourself but will simply take advantage of behavior that’s implemented by a vendor that provides you with development tools. However, as this example illustrates, significant potential exists for simplifying and otherwise streamlining the development process by automating the creation and synchronization of source implementations and their related and dependent side files.

In this chapter, you examined the following topics:

• What metadata is and examples of how it has long been used within Java

• How to define metadata using both predefined and custom annotations

• How to locate metadata using Java’s reflection capabilities

• How annotations have greatly simplified the development of Enterprise JavaBean

• How to use the APT to examine program elements and to generate and synchronize side files