'@' Symbol

[AedonetLIRA]

What does the '@' symbol mean?

More specifically:

@RemoteView
public class aClass ... //rest of class stuff

My best guess is it links to an interface somehow but I have no idea how or why....

Thank for any help or links.
~Aedon

[eRaaaa]

Annotations
Annotations (The Java™ Tutorials > Learning the Java Language > Classes and Objects)

[AedonetLIRA]

Ok so in the example I used:

@RemoteView // an annotation but a class
public class aClass ...

has no real meaning even though RemoteView is a class?

[eRaaaa]

eRaaaa Today, 06:58 PM
AedonetLIRA Today 07:02 PM

have you read the links? :eek:

[AedonetLIRA]

I did and understand that they are primarily used for documentation and the three compiler annotations. What I don't get is the last section on the second link, the annotations used by the compiler.

I'm struggling to see how they connect in a program. I'm reviewing a bit of source that creates an interface using two annotations, and then in a seperate class makes an annotation to the interface. Does this connect something?

snippet from what I'm looking at

@Target({ ElementType.TYPE })
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface RemoteView {
}
...
@RemoteView
public class Button ...

[Singing Boyo]

Annotations have a lot of uses (unit testing being a big one - JUnit). As its being retained to runtime, chances are some other class uses reflection to look at the class and decide what to do based on the annotations used on the class.