Euxx is worried that there will be stuff lost in the head-long plunge into annotations. Annotations won’t be the death of XDoclet, nor for that matter will they be the death of deployment descriptions.

While the _mechanism_ that XDoclet (or related tools) might shift to annotations instead of Javadoc, that won’t always be the case. Consider that you need compiled code to be able to use annotations; they won’t work off source files. What do you do then when the annotation describes a class that you want generated that you refer to in your code (e.g. the generated value objects that XDoclet can create)? You’ll still need a source-code parser for this.

Nor will deployment descriptors go away, so we will need tools to generate them. One problem the .NET guys will discover is that you can’t go around re-compiling just because the datasource cache size has changed; if you’ve got a 3rdparty component you don’t have source to, you still need to tune it. This is the oft-neglected “Deployer” role in the J2EE architecture.

So worry not, Euxx… annotations won’t kill XDoclet.