Annotation File Utilities Java tool that provides support for reading and writing annotation files
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Python library Python utilities annotation

Annotation File Utilities Description

Annotation File Utilities is a Java tool that provides support for reading and writing annotation files.MotivationJava annotations are meta-data about Java program elements, as in “@Deprecated class Date { ... }” or “List”. Ordinarily, Java annotations are written in the source code of a .java Java source file. When javac compiles the source code, it inserts the annotations in the resulting .class file (as “attributes”).External storage of annotationsSometimes, it is convenient to specify the annotations outside the source code or the .class file. The document “Annotation File Format Specification” (PDF, HTML) defines a textual format for annotations, and it also motivates reasons why such a file format is necessary in addition to the .java and .class formats. The file format supports both the declaration annotations introduced in Java 5, and also the type annotations that will appear in a forthcoming version of Java.An annotation file conventionally has the extension .jaif (for Java Annotation Index File).Annotation File UtilitiesProgrammers need to be able to transfer annotations between the three possible locations for annotations — source code, class files, and annotation files. Programmers will want to extract annotations from source and class files to an annotation file in order to easily read annotations, while various tools will only read annotations from source and class files. The Annotation File Utilities provide three tools to read and write annotation files.- insert-annotations reads annotations from an annotation file and inserts them into a class file- extract-annotations reads annotations from a class file and writes them out to an annotation file- insert-annotations-to-source reads annotations from an annotation file and inserts them into a Java source fileThere is no extract-annotations-from-source tool: one can compile the source code and then use extract-annotations to read the annotations from the class file.Product's homepage

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