Why is it said that Annotations complement javadoc tags?
- 4"it is said": by whom? where?Joachim Sauer– Joachim Sauer2009-10-21 12:45:23 +00:00Commented Oct 21, 2009 at 12:45
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2 Answers
Annotations are code and will be represented at the byte code level. Javadoc tags are documentation level artifacts and are meta-data for the javadoc processor.
If retention level of the annotation class is runtime, you can reflect over the class and access the annotation; no such possibility exists for the javadoc tag (unless you have access to source files and are parsing them).
So, in a very narrow sense (e.g. a javadoc processor that does bytecode processing, such as generating code) the tags can be considered "complementary" [sic] to annotations, but that's about it.
Overall, its a bad meme to carry around in your head as it really doesn't inform the true distinction between these two entirely different constructs.
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One possible reason is that the use of annotations can overlap with that of Javadoc tags.
The best example of course is the @deprecated Javadoc tag and the @Deprecated annotation, which both indicate the same thing.
Both annotations and Javadoc tags provide metadata about code elements.