Rocket Surgery

I was recently writing a program to find classes that had a certain annotation on them:

import java.lang.annotation.Documented;
import java.lang.annotation.ElementType;
import java.lang.annotation.Retention;
import java.lang.annotation.RetentionPolicy;
import java.lang.annotation.Target;

/**
 * This annotation works similarly to the @WebMethod
 * annotation. It is used to indicate that the annotated method is allowed to be
 * made visible on a generated facade, and how to do it.
 *
 */
@Target(ElementType.METHOD)
@Documented
@Retention(RetentionPolicy.RUNTIME)
public @interface FacadeMethod
{
	/**
	 * This is the operation name that the annotated object will have on the
	 * generated facade. This will be used as the value for
	 * operationName in the @WebMethod
	 * annotation as well as the name of the method in the facade.
	 *
	 * @return the name that the annotated object will have on the generated
	 *         facade
	 */
	String operationName();

	/**
	 * This is a description of the method which will be used to generate
	 * javadoc on the facade.
	 *
	 * @return a description of the method
	 */
	String description() default "";
}

Methods annotated with this method look something like this:

@FacadeMethod(operationName = "effectivelySame",
              description = "Return true if the two strings are identical, both null, "
                            + "or equivalent after converting to same case and trimming")
public static boolean effectivelySame(String s1, String s2) {
...

What I needed to do was look through a whole mess of jar files that weren’t in the classpath, looking for classes with methods annotated with this annotation, so I could read the operationName and the description properties of the annotation.

Read the rest of this entry »