Annotations with static methods.

Annostic project introduces enhancement to the Java programming language's annotation capabilities by introducing static methods within annotations.

Annostic offers single annotation @StaticProvider that allows other annotations to inherit static methods from annotated interface.

public @interface Example {
    @StaticProvider(target = Example.class)
    interface Static {

        static int one() {
            return 1;
        }

    }
}

In this example, the @Example annotation is defined, and it includes an inner Static interface. The Static interface contains a static method called one() which returns the value 1.

The @StaticProvider annotation acts as a bridge between the annotation specified with the target parameter and the interface's static methods, making these methods accessible as if they were part of the annotation itself.

NOTE: To use the static methods within the project, it is required to access them through the annotated interface (static provider).

During compilation, the interfaces annotated with static providers are hidden as synthetic classes and their targets inherit all their static methods as shown in the example below.

public class ExampleUsage {

    public boolean test() {
        return Example.one() == 1;
    }

}