A modelling language for the effective design of Java annotations

TL;DR

This paper introduces a domain-specific modelling language for designing Java annotations, enhancing expressiveness and constraints, implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, and validated with Java Persistence API annotations.

Contribution

A novel modelling language for Java annotations that explicitly captures their conceptual model and constraints, with an Eclipse tool support and code generation capabilities.

Findings

The language covers a broader scope than existing approaches.

It effectively models complex annotation dependencies and constraints.

Validated with real-world JPA annotations.

Abstract

This paper describes a new modelling language for the effective design of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a useful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in many popular software projects. Usually they are conceived as sets with dependency and integrity constraints within them; however, the native support provided by Java for expressing this design is very limited. To overcome its deficiencies and make explicit the rich conceptual model which lies behind a set of annotations, we propose a domain-specific modelling language. The proposal has been implemented as an Eclipse plug-in, including an editor and an integrated code generator that synthesises annotation processors. The language has been tested using a real set of annotations from the Java Persistence API (JPA). It has proven to cover a greater scope with respect to other related work in different shared areas of application.