Anybody using these?

I am beginning to wonder how I've done without annotations for so long. They've been particularly useful in conjunction with AOP (AspectJ) and the JPA annotations have eliminated the use of XML files and simplified relation definitions, etc.

Which are the ones you use most often? Of course mine are those for the JPA and now AspectJ will feature more often.

lol an app without annotation is so 2006

i don't use AspectJ i find Spring AOP sufficient for most of my needs

i use annotations everywhere in my app from JPA annotations to Spring annotations to Junit annotations.

i also have a few annotations defined at the API level for third part use by client apps

But since AspectJ is basically an extension of the Java language itself, does it not appear to have an edge over Spring AOP?

It does most definately

I haven't done anything fancy with AOP yet, most of what i have done has been around seperating out cross cutting biz logic into aspects which can be reused by my app or by client programs accessing my app via a public API or webservice

Which would u prefer:

@OrderBy or @Sort in sorting a list of entities?

Are you referring to JPA's @OrderBy or @Sort.

i have only used @OrderBy in the past because it gives me the ability to sort a collection at the SQL level.

I am comparing the JPA @OrderBy and the Hibernate @Sort. I prefer the @Sort because it is based on the Java Collections API and can therefore handle more complex sort needs. @OrderBy as you pointed out can only be used in an SQL query, whereas @Sort is not tied to SQL.

you are right.

I normally prefer to get my collections sorted by the database for the simplest cases.

Ofcourse there will be cases where database sorting might not be enough but i haven't come across this yet in the apps i work with

Besides the database can only do numeric and string sorts. Anything more than that will quickly get complex.

true

but info stored in the db are usually strings ,numbers or dates.

i see your point about complex sorting but those tend to be application logic specific