Re: [bv-dev] Talk "Annotations and Annotation Processing: What’s New in JDK 8?"

At J1 there was an interesting talk on what's new in JDK 8 regarding annotations [1]. There are some things which are beneficial for the Bean Validation use case: * JSR 308 (annotations on types): Will allow us to do things like private List<@Email String> emails; Yeah!

* Repeating annotations: One can put the same annotation several times to an element: @Size(min=8, groups=Default.class) @Size(min=16, groups=Admin.class) private String password; The compiler puts that into a container annotation (e.g. @Size.List) and there will be updates to the reflection API to retrieve repeated annotations.

* javax.lang.model backed by Core Reflection: The model API will be usable at runtime, taking reflection types as input: TypeElement someClassElement = createMirror(SomeClass.class); So this will allow to share code between a Bean Validation runtime (which typically uses reflection) and an annotation processor (which typically uses the model API) for checking constraints etc. Hardy, as a bonus, this will make it finally dead easy to discover overridden methods :) : ExecutableElement superFoo = createMirror(Super.class.getDeclaredMethod("foo")); ExecutableElement childFoo = createMirror(Child.class.getDeclaredMethod("foo")); TypeElement childElement = createMirror(Child.class); assert getElements().overrides(childFoo, superFoo, childElement) == true

So it seems there is a BV 1.2 due once JDK 8 is through the door :)