Forgive me if this was already discussed here (its very possible I could
have missed it). But if not, I found this very interesting:
http://blogs.codehaus.org/people/rinkrank/archives/000994_annotations_in_rub
y.html
A most interesting quote from this article is:
It took the Java community forever to do stuff
like this. First a couple of years of XDoclet,
then JSR175. And tons of code too. In Ruby it's
1 hour's work and 25 lines of code. Go figure.
Curt