Andrew David Eisenberg, Gregor Kiczales. A simple edit-time metaobject protocol: controlling the display of metadata in programs. In Peri L. Tarr, William R. Cook, editors, Companion to the 21th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, OOPSLA 2006, October 22-26, 2006, Portland, Oregon, USA. pages 696-697, ACM, 2006. [doi]
I will present a prototype tool that enables Java annotations to serve as an extension point for making programs more visually expressive. Thus, programmers can view and edit code in a way that more closely resembles the intention of the code, rather than the raw text. Examples that we have applied the tool to are JDBC 4.0, getters, setters and constraints, JSR 181 Webservices, AspectJ, and state charts.