A modelling language for the effective design of Java annotations

Abstract

This paper describes a new modelling language for the ef- fective design of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a use- ful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in many popular software projects. Usually they are con- ceived as sets with dependency and integrity constraints within them; however, the native support provided by Java for expressing this design is very limited. To overcome its deficiencies and make explicit the rich conceptual model which lies behind a set of annotations, we propose a domain-specific modelling language. The proposal has been implemented as an Eclipse plug- in, including an editor and an integrated code generator that synthesises annotation processors. The language has been tested using a real set of annotations from the Java Per- sistence API (JPA). It has proven to cover a greater scope with respect to other related work in diferent shared areas of application.