Image via Wikipedia More java framework and APIs that I have been using. you can find the first part this article here: java runtime stack
Annotations came to JDK with JDK5 (2004) since then they evaluated and are accepted so widely and even became more powerful and useful than XML in just 4 years. While you are developing a project with java at any scale you'll need a very large number of XML files defined in very different API's and DTD/XSDs. Which makes configuration very complex. eg:struts.xml,tiles.xml,validation.xml,hibernate.cfg.xml,spring-context.xml,web.xml,and so on Although it is easy to read and modify there are lots files :( Now with annotations:
Image via Wikipedia JAXB is a java framework to XML-Java transformations. JAXB is 2.1 has a very simple API like castor and jibx And annotation driven transformers. Although those configurations can be written manually JAXB has a code generator to generate java files from XSD files. Here is sample JAXB tutorial using maven2: