Java: Out with the Old, In with the New

Question

Java is nearing version 7. It occurs to me that there must be plenty of textbooks and training manuals kicking around that teach methods based on older versions of Java, whe

Answer 1

Annotations

I wonder no one mentioned it so far, but many frameworks rely on annotations, for example Spring and Hibernate. It is common today to deprecate xml configuration files are in favor of annotations in code (though this means losing flexibility in moving from configuration to meta-code, but is often the right choice).The best example is EJB 2 (and older) compared to EJB 3.0 and how programming EJB has been simplified thanks to annotations.

I find annotations also very useful in combination with some AOP tools like AspectJ or Spring AOP. Such combination can be very powerful.