How to use AnnoJ?

As I mentioned in the previous post in AnnoJ everything’s implemented with annotations. More precisely: with runtime annotations. This means that you can place annotations on your packages (I will explain how), classes, methods and fields and these are evaluated at runtime. In the current version of AnnoJ the problem of runtime annotation evaluation is solved with the use of a custom classloader. You must load all your annotated classes with this classloader. To make this task easy AnnoJ defines the MainMethodBootstrap class. This class is responsible for the corrent processing of the annotations. The only thing you have to do is to tell it the name of the main class of your application and the command-line arguments you want to pass. An example:

 public class StarterClass{

		public static void main(String[] args){
			MainMethodBootstrap.callMainMethod("ClassWithMainMethod",
						 new String[]{"something"});
		}
	}

Here ClassWithMainMethod is the main class (ie. contains a public static void main(String[]) method).The command-line arguments to be passed to the main method are listed in the second argument of the callMainMethod() method. And that’s all!

One important thing is that because of the custom classloader at the moment AnnoJ can’t be used in application servers. Hopefully this will change in the future versions.

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