JSR 250, Common Annotations

JSR 250, Common Annotations for the Java platform,

The Java Community Process (JCP) has put up the review for JSR 250, Common Annotations for the Java Platform. This JSR, suported by Sun Microsystems, BEA and Oracle Corp., is currently targeted for J2SE and J2EE platforms. It aims to develop annotations for common semantic concepts in the J2SE and J2EE platforms that apply across a variety of individual technologies, so that all technologies can use the same version of the annotations, thus ensuring consistency. According to the JSR, "With the addition of JSR 175 (A Metadata Facility for the JavaTM Programming Language) in the Java platform we envision that various JSRs will use annotations to enable a declarative style of programming. It would be unfortunate if these JSRs each independently defined their own annotations for common concepts. It would be especially valuable to have consistency within the J2EE 5.0 component JSRs, but it will also be valuable to allowconsistency between J2EE and J2SE. It is the intention of this JSR to define a small set of common annotations that will be available for use within other JSRs. It is hoped that this will help to avoid unnecessary redundancy or duplication between annotations defined in different JSRs. The exact set of annotations will be developed in consultation with the various specifications leads who are currently planning to use annotations within their JSRs." The comments are due by the 30th of August, 2004.

For the uninitiated, JSR 175 is a metadata facility for the JavaTM Programming Language that would allow classes, interfaces, fields, and methods to be marked as having particular attributes. JSR 175 has released the second proposed final draft.