Lambda the Ultimate

From Peeking Inside the Box.

An interesting look at the addition of annotations to the next generation Java. Not sure what the main purpose of this metadata is, but the author discusses it in terms of debugging and instrumentation.

Annotation definitions look a lot like interface definitions, but the keyword @interface is used instead of interface and only methods are supported (though they act more like fields).

   public @interface Status {
       String value();
   }

I can now define my method as follows:

   @Status("Connecting to database")
   public void connectToDB (String url) {
       ...
   }