You say you aren't a big fan of 'heavy use of annotations' but you don't qualify what 'heavy' is so I am guessing that it is pretty much all annotations.
How do you make your determination of what annotations are 'ok' and what annotations aren't? Or do you say something like 'oh, I won't use that annotation because it might blow up on me at some later date'? What is your mental process there? Is @GET good or is @POST bad? What about @Inject or @JsonProperty?
The 'annotations leave a bad taste in my mouth' statement seems kind of odd to me. Generally, a language feature isn't something that I'm careful about avoiding. I could see making a statement like "I tried to use software product XYZ and it was so full of bugs that I switched to software product ABC."
But annotations aren't a software product, they are a language feature that products can take advantage of. It just happens to be that two products you were using had conflicting annotations. No big deal, you still have choices as you can just swap out products. That in itself doesn't make the functionality that annotations provide taste bad.
I've met people who have had this view of annotations as being some magical creature. They didn't understand them or how they worked at all. They stuck it in their heads that 'annotations are bad', so we aren't going to use them and aren't going to even bother learning how they might help us. Everything was very black and white. I found this behavior really odd because everything in software development is grey.
The problem is that guice is using these annotations to wire things together, but so was jax-rs. It's been over a year so I don't remember the exact problem I was having, but the short version is that annotations don't compose well and when two different frameworks require you to place annotations on the same class/method, and then they conflict with one another, it because very hard to fix.
This aligns with my feelings: http://www.nofluffjuststuff.com/blog/brian_gilstrap/2010/02/...
However, I don't know why the author would even suggest that annotations are innocent looking. They aren't any more 'innocent' than an if statement. Something like: 'if (myMethod())' could easily be a long running database query or call out to a fibonacci solver. Should we all be afraid of using if statements too?
I'm sorry, but there is really nothing 'magical' about annotations. It is simply a marker on a class, property or method that other code can read from and do things with. Prior to annotations, apps were processing Javadoc (@see early versions of GWT), which was an even more terrible idea since you didn't know if it was Javadoc or an annotation.
The summary is that a) software engineering is not easy and it does involve knowing what you are doing in order for things to not appear 'magical'. b) If you are going to put an annotation on something, then you should know what code is going to read that annotation and what effects it might have. That said, that isn't the fault of the annotation language feature.
It'd be silly to not dislike these features just because somebody thought that they would be a good idea, without being fully prescient about how the feature would be used in the wild.
