[hibernate-dev] Annotations and JPA

Hello, I am looking into the source code of Hibernate and I am trying to better understand how it is implemented. My question relates to annotation processing by Hibernate. Let's take a simple JPA annotation : [code]@Column[/code]. I would like to know: -What is the class in charge of processing the annotation (at runtime I suppose)? -How and when is the relevant method of that class invoked (at runtime I suppose)? Any clue welcome, Thanks in advance for your replies, Julien.