Tool to identify Java annotations in various Java APIs

Question

I'm trying to identify places where annotation names are the same or similar to compile a list of these things to make sure our team knows where possible points of confusion can be found. For example, Guice @provides and RESTeasy @provider are similar enough in spelling but different enough in semantics as to confuse people so I'd like to call that out explicitly and explain the differences.

What I'm looking for is a tool or even a website that enumerates the annotations associated with packages. This might be a pipe dream, but before I manually start going through and collecting these things I thought I'd check.

I was considering writing one based on Javadoc that simply only pulled in the annotations but I don't have access to Java source files in many cases.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

Answer 1

In Eclipse you can use the standard method "Search for references" (context menu of a used annotation References -> Project) and you are getting a list where the annotations is used within your project.