com.sun.istack.internal.Nullable Annotation and Guice

Question

When Guice says that it recognizes any @Nullable annotation here (http://code.google.com/p/google-guice/wiki/UseNullable) does that mean I can use com.sun.istack.internal.Nullable provided by the Java 7 Runtime successfully?

The fact that the package name is com.sun.istack.internal leads me to believe that I probably shouldn't be using it, but it is pretty convenient to use...

Answer 1

If null is permissible by your class, you can annotate the field or parameter with @Nullable. Guice recognizes any @Nullable annotation, like edu.umd.cs.findbugs.annotations.Nullable or javax.annotation.Nullable. —from the Guice site

To confirm chrylis's hunch above, Guice simply tests the name of the class.

// from core/src/com/google/inject/internal/Nullability.java
if ("Nullable".equals(type.getSimpleName())) {
  return true;
}

Answer 2

You have to use Nullable from javax.annotation package as the example from the site says.

If you check comments on the site, there are links to proper jar library.

        <dependency>
            <groupId>com.google.code.findbugs</groupId>
            <artifactId>jsr305</artifactId>
            <version>3.0.2</version>
        </dependency>

In my case I was about to use Nullable annotation from IntelliJ package. :)