I feel that a few rants are about to burst in me. Let me take this first; this is not a rant, though. Just a very large exclamation:
Java Annotations are NOT a way to implement DSLs, and will never be.
Java annotations are really nice, but seriously, they are NOT manna from heaven.
|
I am a software developer working for Centro de AutonomÃa Digital, mainly with privacy, security and cryptography issues. I have worked on many different things in my life, including programming language design and implementation, security, privacy and cryptography, artificial intelligence and more. |
|
Quito |
10 Comments, Comment or Ping
Who said that you can build DSLs with annotations?
Anyway, annotations are one thing I’m definately missing in Ruby/Rails.
Things like before_filter :login_required, :except=>[…] are just way too error-prone IMO. I’d like to declare this kind of stuff directly where it matters: At the methods.
DSL or not, don’t know. This DSL thing is becoming too much of a buzz to me anyway..
February 13th, 2008
Sounds like some people are getting declarative programming (which annotations DO help with) and DSLs (which may or may not be declarative) confused.
February 14th, 2008
The sociology of Java annotations is interesting. As far as I can tell the Java community basically went “Oh my god! Sun actually gave us AN INTERESTING FEATURE!!!!” and, as one, went mad with delight and decided that they had to use the damn things everywhere and for everything.
February 14th, 2008
Gah! Java Annotations…
They are easily as broken as Java Generics. Possibly worse. Horrible!
I’ll wait for someone to ask before spilling my complete Java 5 rant all over your blog. :-)
February 14th, 2008
Off topic: How is your Scala exploration going? It was a while ago you last mentioned it now…
February 14th, 2008
Gah! Java Annotations…
They are easily as broken as Java Generics. Possibly worse. Horrible!
I’ll wait for someone to ask before spilling my complete Java 5 rant all over your blog. :-)
Generics are horrible, but what’s wrong with annotations? And I’m also interested in the rest of your Java 5 rant, so consider yourself asked :-)
February 14th, 2008
Anonymous… Click on my name to reach my profile and click the Not Coding blog… I posted a draft of my thoughts there. It’s too much to pollute Ola’s blog comments with.
Cheers,
Clinton
February 15th, 2008
Thank you Clinton, very informative! You raise some interesting points that I wasn’t aware of before.
I already had the impression that Java – the language, not the platform – is declining quality wise and reading rants like yours only reinforces that impression.
February 16th, 2008
Sorry, Anonymous, I didn’t mean to leave you with no way to respond on my blog… :-) I posted an email address for feedback.
Clinton
February 16th, 2008
Recently I’ve been working with JBoss Seam. It uses annotations heavily. I’d really like to try using JRuby for some parts of the project, particularly testing (perhaps using jtestr) the part I can’t figure out though is how to handle all the annotations.
April 7th, 2008
Reply to “Java Annotations”