A modelling language for the effective design of Java annotations

This is the author's version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive Version of Record was published in SAC '15 Proceedings of the 30th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2695664.2695717.This paper describes a new modelling language for the ef- fective design of Java annotations. Since their inclusion in the 5th edition of Java, annotations have grown from a use- ful tool for the addition of meta-data to play a central role in many popular software projects. Usually they are con- ceived 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 de ciencies and make explicit the rich conceptual model which lies behind a set of annotations, we propose a domain-speci c 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 Per- sistence API (JPA). It has proven to cover a greater scope with respect to other related work in di erent shared areas of application.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitivity with project Go-Lite (TIN2011-24139) and the Community of Madrid with project SICOMORO (S2013/ICE-3006)