Want to know what meta-annotations are or how they are being used? Click here for some thoughts on the subject...... more »

I was happy to see that InfoQ took up the JSR 277 / JSR 291 stuff again and did a pretty good job weaving together the recent activity (including my own call to interest on the subject). ... more »

As you're probably well aware of, there were several important releases this week. First, NetBeans 5.5 was released. This has been covered extensively by other Sun bloggers so I won't repeat the highlights here - just check it out if you haven't already.... more »

Spring 2.0 introduced annotation support and annotation-aware configuration options that can be leveraged by Spring users who are developing with Java 5 (or later versions):... more »

The metadata facility allows classes, interfaces, fields, and methods to be marked as having particular attributes, enabling them to be processed in special ways by development tools, deployment tools, or run-time libraries.... more »

There have been a lot of enhancements to existing features in Java 1.5 (5.0). One of the simplest improvements is to the most commonly used for loop.... more »

Who controls the iteration? A fundamental issue is deciding which party controls the iteration, the iterator or the client that uses the iterator. When the client controls the iteration, the iterator is called an external iterator (C++ and Java), and when the iterator controls it, the iterator is an internal iterator (Lisp and functional languages). ... more »

Java 5.0's for-each loop saves keystrokes, but that's not all it does. It offers opportunities for compiler optimizations, as well as for subtle bugs from unboxing and null-handling. Nishanth Sastry has some strategies for getting the most out of 5.0's for-each.... more »

Java EE 5 achieves a high level of simplification over previous editions of the platform by using annotations for declarative programming. In this article, Sangeetha S. and Subrahmanya S. V. look into this approach and its many uses.... more »

In this excerpt from Java Generics and Collections, authors Maurice Naftalin and Philip Wadler show how to make the switch to Java 5.0 generics, not by expecting you to flip a switch across your whole code base, but by having you gradually work generics into your code while maintaining compatibility.... more »