2013/1/16 Emmanuel Bernard <emmanuel@hibernate.org>

The small advantage I find in having two annotations is that it is readable at a glance what the constraint is even just by reading its javadoc (assuming @Documented). In the second approach, you need to explicitly put it in the javadoc or have your users access to the source code and parse the @Constraint

Which JavaDoc do you mean, the JavaDoc for the definition a constraint annotation type or the JavaDoc for an element annotated with a constraint annotation?

The former contains all meta annotations, including their members, so the type would be recognizable either way. The latter only contains the actual constraint annotation itself (i.e. no meta-annotations) if the constraint is annotated with @Documented. So afaics, from the JavaDoc of a constraint usage site it's not recognizable whether the constraint is generic or cross-parameter (if it's not encoded into the name).

Or did you mean something else?

--Gunnar