Chapter 21. Annotations with XDoclet and J2SE Metadata

Code annotations can simplify enterprise development tasks. They allow you to place metadata about your code directly into your code and then use this metadata in various ways, such as automatically generating artifacts related to the code (documentation, deployment descriptors, and configuration files), running reports of various kinds over the code, and even generating supplementary code.

There are currently a number of annotation-related tools and libraries available through open source projects as well as tools available for specific Java IDEs and application server environments. In addition, a standard code metadata facility was added to the language as of J2SE 5.0.