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Are annotations hot-swappable?

I've been working on annotations support in RIFE for a few days, and now that I'm testing them in real projects I stumbled into what seems like a major downer.

When a class is recompiled and hot-swapped, are annotations supposed to be hot-swapped also? I don't get any warnings from the JVM to indicate that something wasn't swapped correctly, but I don't seem to get updated annotations either.

Does anyone know if this is supposed to be supported?

posted by Geert Bevin in Java on Mar 10, 2006 6:53 PM : 5 comments [permalink]

Comments

Re: Are annotations hot-swappable?

Nope, they aren't. Sun is stupid.

posted by Patrick Lightbody on Mar 14, 2006 8:16 PM

Re: Are annotations hot-swappable?

Indeed they are, another classloader trick just to work around that

posted by Geert Bevin on Mar 14, 2006 8:20 PM

Re: Are annotations hot-swappable?

This is a known issue:
5002251: potential bug with annotations and class file evolution

It is going to be fixed in Mustang or Dolphin release depending on the
available resources.

Serguei Spitsyn
Software engineer
Serviceability Team
Sun Microsystems

posted by Serguei on Mar 15, 2006 6:46 AM

Re: Are annotations hot-swappable?

Patrick Lightbody & Geert Bevin,

It would be wise (not stupid) from your side to apologize for
insulting the colleagues in my team which I love and respect.

Serguei Spitsyn

posted by Serguei Spitsyn on Mar 15, 2006 9:12 AM

Re: Are annotations hot-swappable?

Hi Serguei,
I'm sorry if you took this personal but this is not directed towards you in specific, nor any of your colleagues. This is really an expression of frustration about issues that have been present for a long time and that are not being addressed by Sun (http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=4910812 and http://forum.java.sun.com/thread.jspa?messageID=3949087). Java is really lacking in the ease-of-use department for iterative development and it's getting increasingly frustrating. I too am totally baffled by this new discovery where annotations are not hot-swappable. To me this clearly indicates a lack of vision and understanding of meta programming. If there is something that you want to change quickly during development of a running application, it's the meta data! The forum thread I linked has several people on there that are willing to help out, someone even delved into the code but needs help to understand what is going on. However, suddenly no comments are added to the forum thread anymore and Sun went totally silent. If the JDK development is supposed to have "opened up", this is clearly a counter indicator of that. Try being silent for 5 months towards interested and concerned contributors of any open-source project, and see how long your project will last!

Best regards,

Geert

posted by Geert Bevin on Mar 15, 2006 9:33 AM

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< RIFE at JavaWUG BOF XVI in London on March 17th

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