What is annotations? In simple terms?

Question

In Groovy++ I often hear of the term Annotations. Can anyone explain me what is that in simple terms?

Answer 1

In short It's a way to label a piece of code. But it's not Groovy specific thing.

These labels can be used as meta-data by other applications to perform tasks like identifying unit test, dependency injection, or just a way to tell someone that a method is deprecated.

Here is a link to some java documentation.

Answer 2

Some basic info to get you started.

http://groovy.codehaus.org/Annotations+with+Groovy