Sun's posted the early draft review of JSR-250 Common Annotations for the Java™ Platform. According to the draft,
With the addition of JSR 175 (A Metadata Facility for the JavaTM Programming Language) in the Java platform we envision that various technologies will use annotations to enable a declarative style of programming. It would be unfortunate if these technologies each independently defined their own annotations for common concepts. It would be especially valuable to have consistency within the J2EE 5.0 component technologies, but it will also be valuable to allow consistency between J2EE and J2SE.
It is the intention of this Specification to define a small set of common annotations that will be available for use within other Specifications. It is hoped that this will help to avoid unnecessary redundancy or duplication between annotations defined in different JSRs. This would allow us to have the common annotations all in one place and let the technologies refer to this specification rather than have them specified in multiple specifications. This way all technologies can use the same version of the annotations and there will be consistency in the annotations used across the platforms.
Java 1.5 or later will be required for this work. Comments are due by April 22.