POJO - Complex New Perl Classes

Over the last year the term POJO has enjoyed an enormous success in the Java community. One of the major reasons for this being, of course, introduction of annotations in JDK 5.0. The new version of EJB shows us the promised land where no home or remote interface step, JAXB 2.0 works exclusively with annotations, and there is even a whole JSR that aims to standardize common annotations in Java.

But i wonder how exactly a Java class seasoned with assorted annotations qualifies as POJO. Let's stop for a minute and analyze the abbreviation itself (well, i know that it sounds very sexy, and has a lot of connotations, no pun intended).

• The P stands for plain. A java class with annotations is quite far from being plain. The annotations can be quite complex (take a look at the JAXB 2.0 generated classes).
• The O stands for old. Apart from the obvious (that the annotations are only part of JDK 5.0), i don't see many examples of new JSRs that propose to work with classes that aren't annotated at all.
• The J stands for java. More on this later in the entry, but annotations make a class to be non-standard Java (in my view).
• The O stands for object. The annotations are on classes, and not on a single instance, but this may be more suitable for BileBlog incoherent blabbering.

And now to the main problem of annotations. As advocated by many (including the vehement supporters of EJB 3.0), the annotations were devised to make our lives easier. No more need for complex XML configuration files, no more need for getter and setters that conform to bean standard, no more need for marker interfaces and so on. Just mark your field / method / class with an annotation, and you get all that you could before at half a price. But what exactly have we achieved?

• The configuration XML file is now spread all over our class model. Furthermore, once you compiled your classes, you can't configure annotations (correct me if i'm wrong).
• The bean getters and setters are gone, but instead the corresponding fields are marked with a predefined annotation. You say potato, and i say @potato.
• The marker interfaces are gone, but instead the corresponding classes are marked with a predefined annotation. You say tomato, and i say @tomato.
• Everybody is welcome to create his own annotations. Everybody can finally feel like a king and create his own kingdom. Everybody can finally create his own flavour of Java. Everybody does. Sun realizes that and tries to come up with common annotations. The community happily ignores the JSR. It becomes impossible to read the code because each field and class has more than 10 annotations attached to them. Java becomes Perl.