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Annotation is a form of syntactic metadata that can be added to Java source code. Classes, methods, variables, parameters and Java packages may be annotated. Annotations are available since Java version 5, codenamed Tiger, and released in 2004. The most simple annotation looks like the following: An annotated class can be set on a target or an interface. Since Java 5, deprecation was set in the JavaDocs, this is a very fragile approach: the only way to leverage it is via the javadoc tool. The tool can be configured via a custom doclet.