Introduction

Annotation is used to provide a metadata of code. It is a part of the code file itself. It is used to give some extra information about the code and can be used with variables, method packages, the interface, or the class itself.

The advantages of annotation are that it's easy to use and makes the development process faster. Before annotation was introduced, there were many methodologies which were used to provide information to the code, such as XML-based mapping. Here, we will take a look at how annotations are useful in the development process.

In this chapter, we will consider the basic and necessary annotations used to start development using hibernate.