Joseph D. Darcy's Sun Weblog

Monday July 27, 2009

An apt replacement

Showing that no rule is so broad as to not admit an exception, the apt tool and its associated API, com.sun.mirror.*, are being deprecated in JDK 7. The plan is to remove the tool and its API to the next major JDK release after JDK 7.

As a com.sun.* API, the apt API is not governed by the JCP; however, we don't usually mass-deprecate com.sun.* APIs either. We introduced apt in JDK 5 to gain experience with annotation processing before standardizing this facility with JSR 269 in JDK 6, which added the javax.annotation.processing and javax.lang.model.* packages and added annotation processing options to javac.

As the lead engineer for both apt and JSR 269, the JSR 269 API and tool experience should be uniformly better than apt; the newer API is easier to use, more flexible, and should run faster as well. I unconditionally recommend transitioning to the JSR 269 API and javac (or its compiler API) for all your annotation processing needs.

The table below summarizes the apt deprecation information.