Method references in annotations?

[Ben Evans]

On Thu, Aug 11, 2011 at 12:14 AM, Stephen Colebourne
<scolebourne at joda.org>wrote:

> On 10 August 2011 20:24, Dan Smith <daniel.smith at oracle.com> wrote:
> > Discussions along the lines of "yeah, those are things we should get to
> sometime" have happened here, internally at Oracle, and in the JSR 335
> expert group.
>
> I will just note that I've raised this before. Frameworks in
> particular constantly have to wrestle with how to handle the lack of
> method references, generally using strings. Adding method references
> to the main body of code helps those framework writers a bit, but not
> being usable in annotations is a major limitation and a huge missed
> opportunity.
>

Nor is this situation static.

E.g. both JSR 349 (Bean Validation) and JSR 350 (effectively, Container
Managed State) have glaringly obvious places where a method reference in an
annotation would be very useful.

Have the reasons for this omission been discussed in detail on the JSR 335
EG? Is there a public Observers alias for that EG?

Thanks,

Ben