Repeating Annotations and backwards compatibility

[Paul Benedict]

Alex,

Does this mean that future specs will no longer strive to create new
container annotations? Presumably with repeating annotations, container
annotations are no longer a necessary design feature.

Paul

On Thu, Sep 13, 2012 at 2:00 PM, Alex Buckley <alex.buckley at oracle.com>wrote:

> On Thursday, September 13, 2012 9:04:39 AM, Paul Benedict wrote:
>
>> Was there any consideration given to NOT retrofitting annotations? That
>> is,
>> just allow repeating annotations; those with historical grouping
>> annotations have to retain them to maintain the same reflection results.
>> Then no "looking through" magic needs to occur at the reflection level. I
>> think that's much more straight-forward than what's being proposed.
>>
>
> The goal was to be able to write repeating annotations without writing the
> container annotation manually, and still have legacy consumers work without
> modification when they a) expect a container annotation from
> getAnnotation(Class<T>) and b) do not expect repeating annotations from
> get[Declared]Annotations(). The Java EE group believes the number of these
> legacy consumers to be significant.
>
> New consumers which use the new get[Declared]Annotations(**Class<T>)
> methods can choose to ignore container annotations and grab the
> possibly-repeated annotations directly.
>
> Alex
>