Annotations in Scala

So, I've been playing about with some ideas for writing this REST framework I just mentioned this morning. And I've been playing with doing it in Scala, because - well - I like Scala even if I don't always get on with it. And I've been working on doing it with Annotations, in the same way that Spring MVC works, because I quite like that and it's nice and clean and easy to understand. It's kind of like the DSL techniques that I've seen done elsewhere, but without introducing any magic into the system that makes it difficult to understand how it works - it's simply just classes and methods that have annotations on them. And it also happens to make it easy to extend for other uses - you just add more annotations and it just works. This makes the Swagger integration trivial to add on later.

It's worth putting a quick note in first - the documentation on this is all marked very clearly with an Experimental tag, so it's no surprise that it's not rock solid yet. I'm sure that in a release or two it will be fantastic, but it's just not there yet.

However, Annotations are far from a first class citizen in Scala. I'm not sure they even count as second-class citizens from what I've been seeing. Actually writing an annotation in Scala is easy. You simply write a class that extends from StaticAnnotation and it just works. (Not quite the whole story, but you can work out the rest yourself I'm sure). That's where Easy ends though.

Actually introspecting an object at runtime to get the annotations on it is possible, but it's not trivial. It took me a fair bit of hacking away to get at the following:



This works, and the annotations variable contains a list of all the annotations on the class. However - and I don't understand this yet - it doesn't always work. I wrote this in a unit test, and I found that the unit test passed about 90% of the time, without actually changing anything at all! That's scary, and has totally put me off of using Scala annotations for now.

Instead, I've just re-written my annotation in Java, and using it is as trivial as using any Java annotation even when I'm annotating a Scala class. The actual use of a Java annotation is virtually identical to using a Scala annotation - though the Scala annotations do offer more flexibility in that they are full-on classes and so I assume they can contain their own behaviours if you want. I'm not sure where that would ever be useful though to be honest...