An
annotation, in the
Java computer programming language, is a form of syntactic
metadata that can be added to
Java source code. Classes, methods, variables, parameters and packages may be annotated. Unlike
Javadoc tags, Java annotations can be
reflective in that they can be embedded in
class files generated by the compiler and may be retained by the Java VM to be made retrievable at
run-time. It is possible to create meta-annotations out of the existing ones in Java.