Hi friend,

Annotation is the way of associating the program elements with the meta tags so that the compiler can extract program behavior to support the annotated elements to generate interdependent code when necessary.

It provide data about a program that is not part of the program itself.
They have no direct effect on the operation of the code they annotate.

Annotations have a number of uses, among them:

* Information for the compiler ? Annotations can be used by the compiler to detect errors or suppress warnings.

* Compiler-time and deployment-time processing ? Software tools can process annotation information to generate code, XML files, and so forth.

* Runtime processing ? Some annotations are available to be examined at runtime.

Annotations can be applied to a program's declarations of classes, fields, methods, and other program elements.

Defining an annotation (Annotation type)

public @interface Example {
String showSomething();
}

Annotating the code (Annotation)

Example (showSomething="Hi! How r you")
public void anymethod() {
....
}


Annotation Types: Three types of annotations types are there in java.

* Marker: Like the marker interface, marker annotations does not contain any elements except the name itself.
The example given below clarifies the concept of marker interface.

Example:

public @interface Example{

}

Usage:

@Example
public void anymethod() {
------------
}

* Single-value: This type of elements provide only single value.
It means that these can be represented with the data and value pair or we can use the
shortcut syntax (just by using the value only within the parenthesis).

Example:

public @interface Example{

String showSomething();

}

Usage:

@Example ("Hi ! How r you")
public void anymethod(){

--------

}

* Multi-value or Full-value: These types of annotations can have multiple data members.
Therefore use full value annotations to pass the values to all the data members.

Example:

public @interface Example{

String showSomething();
int num;
String name;

}

Usage:

@Example (showSomething = "Hi! How r you", num=5, name="zulfiqar" )
public void anymethod{

// code here

}

For read more information on Annotations visit to :

http://www.roseindia.net/hibernate/hibernateannotations/hibernate-annotations-tutorial.shtml

http://www.roseindia.net/ejb/Annotations.shtml

Thanks