A modelling language for the effective design of Java 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.
Cite
@article{arxiv.1807.03566,
title = {A modelling language for the effective design of Java annotations},
author = {Irene Córdoba and Juan de Lara},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1807.03566},
year = {2019}
}
Comments
6 pages, 6 figures, 2015 conference