The Metadata Facility for Java is a specification for

Java Java (; id, Jawa, ; jv, ꦗꦮ; su, ) is one of the Greater Sunda Islands in Indonesia. It is bordered by the Indian Ocean to the south and the Java Sea to the north. With a population of 151.6 million people, Java is the world's mo ...

that defines an API for annotating fields,

methods Method ( grc, μέθοδος, methodos) literally means a pursuit of knowledge, investigation, mode of prosecuting such inquiry, or system. In recent centuries it more often means a prescribed process for completing a task. It may refer to: *Scien ...

, and classes as having particular attributes that indicate they should be processed in specific ways by

development tool A programming tool or software development tool is a computer program that software developers use to create, debug, maintain, or otherwise support other programs and applications. The term usually refers to relatively simple programs, that can b ...

s, deployment tools, or run-time libraries. The specification was developed under the

Java Community Process The Java Community Process (JCP), established in 1998, is a formalized mechanism that allows interested parties to develop standard technical specifications for Java technology. Anyone can become a JCP Member by filling a form available at thJCP w ...

as JSR 175, and was released as a part of J2SE 5.0 (Tiger).

External links

JSR 175
''A Metadata Facility for the Java Programming Language''
JSR 250
'' Common Annotations'' (defines common

Java SE Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) is a computing platform for development and deployment of portable code for desktop and server environments. Java SE was formerly known as Java 2 Platform, Standard Edition (J2SE). The platform uses Ja ...

and

Java EE Jakarta EE, formerly Java Platform, Enterprise Edition (Java EE) and Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE), is a set of specifications, extending Java SE with specifications for enterprise features such as distributed computing and web ser ...

annotations)
JSR 269
''Pluggable Annotation Processing API'' (defines a pluggable interface for developing build-time annotation processors)

Java specification requests {{prog-lang-stub