Annotation SOURCE Retention Policy

Question

From the Java doc:

CLASS: Annotations are to be recorded in the class file by the compiler but need not be retained by the VM at run time.

RUNTIME:

Answer 1

Things like @SuppressWarnings, @Override are annotations used by the compiler - not needed at runtime. For those RetentionPolicy.SOURCE would make sense. Also annotations can be used to generate code (look at Spring ROO) - such annotation are also not required at run time.