The Server Side has an article on when to use code Annotations.
Code Annotations are Meta-Data in the code. And the Java community is happy to be getting annotations in Java 5. THe .NET crowd has had them for a while now.
But maybe the emphesis in my title gave away my point. It's Meta-Data. Get it? More Data.
The Object Oriented way to solve the same problem is with objects. Meta-Objects, or Meta-Classes. Java followed .NET down the road of taking the Data-Processing approach.
Annotations may look helpful. And perhaps they are. But they won't solve development problems as cleanly and maintainably as OO could.
We need to look to other languages (like Ruby perhaps) to actually provide Meta-Classes and an Object Oriented approach.
