Arguments Against Annotations

Question

My team is moving to Spring 3.0 and there are some people who want to start moving everything into Annotations. I just get a really bad feeling in my gut (code smell?) when

Answer 1

Maybe you have a problem with redundant annotations that are all over the code. With meta-annotations redundant annotations can be replaced and your annotations are at least DRY.

From the Spring Blog:

@Service
@Scope("request")
@Transactional(rollbackFor=Exception.class)
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface MyService {
}

@MyService
public class RewardsService {
…
}

Because Java evolves so slowly people are putting more features that are missing in the language into annotations. This is a good thing Java can be extended in some form and this is a bad thing as most of the annotations are some workaround and add complexity.