Today we (Jonas and Alex) released backport175 1.0 RC 1.

Overview

backport175 is backport of the Java 5 annotations (JSR-175) specification. Making strongly typed annotation available for Java 1.3/1.4 platforms. They are bytecode compatible with Java 5 annotations making them available for use by tools etc.

backport175 is Open Source and freely available under Apache License Version 2.0.

Modules

It has two separate modules:

• Compiler - which compiles the backport175 annotations and puts them into the bytecode of the class (compatible with regular Java 5 RuntimeVisible annotations).

• Reader - which allows you to read the backport175 annotations as well as regular Java 5 annotation through one single uniformed API. The reader also has an API for runtime management, which allows you to update the bytecode at runtime and have your changes propagated.

Plugins

It also comes with an Ant task and is fully integrated with an Eclipse plugin and an IntelliJ IDEA plugin.

Here is an example of the IDEA plugin in action

Read more here...