Java introduced annotations upon their Java 1.5 release. Since then, annotations have shaped the way we design our applications. In this article, we’ll talk about a set of predefined annotation types in the Java SE API. Some annotation types are used by the Java compiler and some apply to other annotations. What Is Annotation? Annotations are Java types that are preceded by an @ symbol. Java has had annotations ever since the 1.5 release. Since then, they’ve shaped the way we’ve designed our applications. Spring and Hibernate are great examples of frameworks that rely heavily on annotations to enable various design techniques. Basically, an annotation assigns extra metadata to the…