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Is it Just Me, or Are Annotations Taking Over the World?

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Dave Woodman

Is it Just Me, or Are Annotations Taking Over the World?

It seems that everywhere I look I find useful Java stuff that relies on annotations! The evil metadata spawned by JSR-175 is getting pervasive.

Now that we are looking at a minimum requirement of Java 1.6, could we consider some minimal support for annotations? My thoughts are that, just as annotations are not really a part of “regular” Java, neither should they be in NetRexx, so a simple pass-through mechanism should be sufficient to allow them to be used (only used, see later)

If starting an annotation with “@” is not seen as a smart thing to do, compatibility could be preserved against older version by using “--@” which would be seen as a comment by current versions. Line-continuation would cover the multi-line aspects of an annotation, and the syntax used as-is.

So, that would allow for the use of annotations, and would be sufficient for the majority of things that I have seen. The definition of a custom annotation seems, at first glance, to be simply the implementation of the @interface keyword, but some of the constraints imposed on their method definitions are not NetRexx friendly (cannot return a NetRexx object for instance, although a String would be allowed).

Given that the use of annotation could require minimal changes, could this be considered? Custom annotation definitions would require considerably more thought, and a change to the language proper - better minds than mine would have opinions on the same.

So much for my musings,

Dave.

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rvjansen

Re: Is it Just Me, or Are Annotations Taking Over the World?

yes, I is everywhere - jUnit, Cucumber, all new J2EE things. We must do something about it. I asked one of the J2EE evangelists ( I can look up his name ) during a presentation about this, if they had given any thought to alternative JVM languages while sticking in annotations everywhere; the answer boiled down to: “No, and we don’t care.” So I guess we have some reading up to do and bite this bullet.

best regards,

René.

On 7 mei 2015, at 23:35, Dave Woodman <[hidden email]> wrote:

It seems that everywhere I look I find useful Java stuff that relies on annotations! The evil metadata spawned by JSR-175 is getting pervasive.

Now that we are looking at a minimum requirement of Java 1.6, could we consider some minimal support for annotations? My thoughts are that, just as annotations are not really a part of “regular” Java, neither should they be in NetRexx, so a simple pass-through mechanism should be sufficient to allow them to be used (only used, see later)

If starting an annotation with “@” is not seen as a smart thing to do, compatibility could be preserved against older version by using “--@” which would be seen as a comment by current versions. Line-continuation would cover the multi-line aspects of an annotation, and the syntax used as-is.

So, that would allow for the use of annotations, and would be sufficient for the majority of things that I have seen. The definition of a custom annotation seems, at first glance, to be simply the implementation of the @interface keyword, but some of the constraints imposed on their method definitions are not NetRexx friendly (cannot return a NetRexx object for instance, although a String would be allowed).

Given that the use of annotation could require minimal changes, could this be considered? Custom annotation definitions would require considerably more thought, and a change to the language proper - better minds than mine would have opinions on the same.

So much for my musings,

Dave.

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Kermit Kiser

Re: Is it Just Me, or Are Annotations Taking Over the World?

If this is a significant issue, please file an enhancement request on the project's tracking system:

https://kenai.com/jira/browse/NETREXX/?selectedTab=com.atlassian.jira.jira-projects-plugin:summary-panel

Thanks,
-- Kermit

On 5/7/2015 2:50 PM, René Jansen wrote:

yes, I is everywhere - jUnit, Cucumber, all new J2EE things. We must do something about it. I asked one of the J2EE evangelists ( I can look up his name ) during a presentation about this, if they had given any thought to alternative JVM languages while sticking in annotations everywhere; the answer boiled down to: “No, and we don’t care.” So I guess we have some reading up to do and bite this bullet.

best regards,

René.

On 7 mei 2015, at 23:35, Dave Woodman <[hidden email]> wrote:

It seems that everywhere I look I find useful Java stuff that relies on annotations! The evil metadata spawned by JSR-175 is getting pervasive.

Now that we are looking at a minimum requirement of Java 1.6, could we consider some minimal support for annotations? My thoughts are that, just as annotations are not really a part of “regular” Java, neither should they be in NetRexx, so a simple pass-through mechanism should be sufficient to allow them to be used (only used, see later)

If starting an annotation with “@” is not seen as a smart thing to do, compatibility could be preserved against older version by using “--@” which would be seen as a comment by current versions. Line-continuation would cover the multi-line aspects of an annotation, and the syntax used as-is.

So, that would allow for the use of annotations, and would be sufficient for the majority of things that I have seen. The definition of a custom annotation seems, at first glance, to be simply the implementation of the @interface keyword, but some of the constraints imposed on their method definitions are not NetRexx friendly (cannot return a NetRexx object for instance, although a String would be allowed).

Given that the use of annotation could require minimal changes, could this be considered? Custom annotation definitions would require considerably more thought, and a change to the language proper - better minds than mine would have opinions on the same.

So much for my musings,

Dave.

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