Software maintainability benefits from annotation-driven code

Java annotations and their predecessors XDoclet annotations are well positioned to offer a substantial benefit for developing and maintaining software by combining relevant metadata together with the code that makes use of them. In this paper we share the insights that we gained by developing the J2EE Connector Tools suite, which is part of IBM Rational Application Developer. This tools suite is used to generate annotated Java code capable of connecting to Enterprise Information Systems through the Java EE Connector APIs. The generated code is annotation driven, and in the paper we show how the annotations in the generated code helped us to achieve a high degree of efficient code maintenance for the tools that generate the code as well as for the generated code itself.