Annotations have been there in the Java World from Java 5.0. Java Annotations are a result of the
JSR 175 which aimed in providing a
Meta-Data Facility to the
Java Programming Language. It can be greatly used by the Build-time Tools and Run-time Environments to do a bunch of useful tasks like
Code Generation,
Validation and other valuable stuffs. Java 6 has introduced a new JSR called
JSR 269, which is the
Pluggable Annotation Processing API. With this API, now it is possible for the Application Developers to write a
Customized Annotation Processor which can be plugged-in to the code to operate on the set of Annotations that appear in a Source File.
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