Are type annotations part of the Java language?
Type annotations will be a part of the Java 7 language. The Type Annotations Specification (also known by its Sun codename “JSR 308”) has not yet received official final approval. That is a formality: language JSRs are never approved until the last moment before a Java language release, just in case they need to change. (It is very difficult to change a language JSR once it has been officially approved.) The Type Annotations Specification is already quite stable, and explicitly notes the few places where expansion or enhancement is needed. An indication of Sun’s support of type annotations is that as of build b64 (publicly released on July 9, 2009), Sun’s OpenJDK supports type annotations. M4 was the first milestone release that contained this support. (The Type Annotations Compiler is a variant of the OpenJDK compiler with some extra features for compatibility with non-Java-7 compilers.
