Talk:Java annotation

Just added in a line in 'See Also' mentioning the equivelent construct from .NET, Attributes which predate this by a while. I'm sure there's languages out there that actually supply a much older example, so maybe it's worth finding a very early example of this kind of declarative/reflective reasoning and inter-referencing the articles.

Additionally, I know this sounds odd, given what I've just done, but is it really worth having a whole article on a small langauge feature like this? I know it's new, but it seems very much something that could live in another article. The .NET languages do not have an 'Attributes' page, and the feature has been around since inception and is supported in just about every language that runs in the CLR. Seems like a merge-candidate to me....

84.12.100.241 10:31, 15 April 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Alternative to XML?

The article claims that "many times" annotations are used as an alternative to XML. Apart from the weaselly "many times", what does this mean? AFAICT the two are completely orthogonal. I could say something like

@FooFile("foo.xml")

or

@FooInfo("<bar><spam>quux</spam></bar>")

I could use reflection to serialize annotation data as XML, I could use information that happened to be represented as XML to generate annotations, etc., etc.

Annotations are a programming construct. XML is, well, I don't want to open that can of worms too far, but let's say "a syntax and a data model" and leave it at that. This sounds like one of those "Is it farther to Chicago or by boat?" comparisons. -Dmh 12:36, 26 September 2007 (UTC)[reply]