Question

I know java annotation is a powerfull tool. For me, project lombok is a great example of extreme use. But i’ve heard that sometimes, it is better not to use annotations.

Can you give me examples of bad annotations, so i have an idea of what to avoid ?

Answer 1

It’s like asking in which situations a spoon isn’t useful.

Instead it can typically beneficial to use annotations when

• You’re constructing a framework which will be used by many components.

  • For instance I once made a gui framework and added annotations such as @CSS etc.
  • Hibernate provides in my opinion a great approach to annotation based database mapping

• You need to perform some compile-time task, like generating javadoc.

• Dependency injection