Annotation

From APIDesign

Taken from wikipedia::Annotations:

Annotations provide data about a software program that is not part of the program itself. They have no direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate.

Annotations have a number of uses, among them:

• Information for the compiler — Annotations can be used by the compiler to detect errors or suppress warnings.
• Compiler-time and deployment-time processing — Software tools (like AnnotationProcessors) can process annotation information to generate boilerplate code, XML files, and so forth.
• Runtime processing — Some annotations are available to the developer/manager for examination at runtime.

Annotations can be applied to a program's declarations of classes, fields, methods, interfaces, arrays and other program elements. Compile time annotations are useful for generating CompileTimeCaches.