Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Annotations are used at compile-time or runtime?

There is a lot of confusion among folks on the scope of annotations - whether annotations are used only at compile-time or also at runtime?

The answer is that it depends on the RETENTION POLICY of the annotation. An annotation can have one of the three retention policies.

RetentionPolicy.SOURCE: Available only during the compile phase and not at runtime. So they aren't written to the bytecode. Example: @Override, @SuppressWarnings

RetentionPolicy.CLASS: Available in the *.class file, but discarded by the JVM during class loading. Useful when doing bytecode-level post-processing. But not available at runtime.

RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME: Available at runtime in the JVM loaded class. Can be assessed using reflection at runtime. Example: Hibernate / Spring annotations.

No comments:

Post a Comment