Annotations are notes in Java programs to instruct the Java compiler to do something.
Java provides three standard annotations and four standard meta-annotations.
An annotation type is a special interface type.
An annotation is an instance of an annotation type.
An annotation type has a name and members.
The information contained in an annotation takes the form of key/value pairs.
There can be zero or multiple pairs and each key has a specific type.
It can be a String, int, or other Java types.
Annotation types with no key/value pairs are called marker annotation types.
Those with one key/value pair are referred to single-value annotation types.
There are three annotation types in Java 5: Deprecated, Override, and Suppress Warnings.
There are four other annotation types that are part of the java.lang.annotation package: Documented, Inherited, Retention, and Target.
These four annotation types are used to annotate annotations,