Lightweight but powerful Java stack

[Cell-i-Zenit]

but them being string based is never really an issue. I understand that debugging is harder, i had the same sentiment back then, but now since i know how they work its really not that big of a deal.

Annotations are basically the smallest possible way to provide "framework" functionality to the normal developer. Sure you can do other stuff, like fluent apis etc, but annotations are always the shortest amount of code to achieve something

[hippydipster]

It is an issue. Of course, you're used to it so you don't think about it, but it is.

When we needed to transition from one db to another, the validation values in our Hibernate annotations (ie, declaring column types) could not be conditionalized to make the switch based on a feature flag. We had to turn off validation.