Programming Scala

Chapter 13. Application Design

In this chapter, we take a pragmatic look at developing applications in Scala. We discuss a few language and API features that we haven’t covered before, examine common design patterns and idioms, and revisit traits with an eye toward structuring our code effectively.

Annotations

Like Java and .NET, Scala supports annotations for adding metadata to declarations. Annotations are used by a variety of tools in typical enterprise and Internet applications. For example, there are annotations that provide directives to the compiler, and some Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) frameworks use annotations on types and type members to indicate persistence mapping information. While some uses for annotations in the Java and .NET worlds can be accomplished through other means in Scala, annotations can be essential for interoperating with Java and .NET libraries that rely heavily on them. Fortunately, Java and .NET annotations can be used in Scala code.

The interpretation of Scala annotations depends on the runtime environment. In this section, we will focus on the JDK environment.

In Java, annotations are declared using special conventions, e.g., declaring annotations with the @interface keyword instead of the class or interface keyword. Here is the declaration of an annotation taken from a toolkit called Contract4J (see [Contract4J]) that uses annotations to support Design by Contract programming in Java (see also Better Design with Design By Contract). Some of the ...