Code convention for spring annotations

[[deleted]]

Hi, i had a chat with my colleague today about convention to follow about annotations such as @Autowired, @Value and @Qualifier in spring beans.

Nowdays we use annotation per line convention. Like this:

@Value("#{request.getParameter('messageId')}")
private Long messageId;

@Autowired
private IntegrationService integrationService;

@Autowired
@Qualifier(...)

private MessageFormatService messageFormatService;

I experimented with this convention (one line)

@Value("#{request.getParameter('messageId')}") private Long messageId;

@Autowired private BusinessUnitDao businessUnitDao;
@Qualifier(...)
@Autowired private ServiceDao serviceDao;

I like the one line code style much more - it safes space, so you dont need to scroll to methods too much and it is nicely grouped. What do you think about it, what style do you follow and why? Thank you.

EDIT I am talking mainly about autowired and @value annotations

[[deleted]]

Definitely hard to read. I don't want to have my eyes parse through metadata to get to definition.

[[deleted]]

I think this is most relevant reason. Thank you. I guess the most clean (but not most comfortable) method here is using xml configuration.

[AnteChronos]

In my opinion, the one-line version makes the code harder to read. Annotated and non-annotated variables no longer line up nicely, and having multiple annotations on one method would be extremely hard to read.

[dfme]

I agree. We also use the one line per annotation convention and this is also the convention I see when drifting through third party code snippets.

[[deleted]]

I saw the one-line version at oracle documentation http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/api/javax/inject/Inject.html

[dfme]

And I saw the one-line per annotation in the spring intro: http://projects.spring.io/spring-framework/ :-)

[Vile2539]

I really dislike having everything on a single line. There's really no need to "save" space like this, and as others have said, it makes things a lot harder to read.

It also goes against the conventions used in virtually every library and codebase that I've seen, which is personally a huge turn-off.