In the Java computer programming language, an annotation is a form of syntactic metadata that can be added to Java source code. Classes, methods, variables, parameters and packages may be annotated. Unlike Javadoc tags, Java annotations can be reflective in that they can be embedded in class files generated by the compiler and may be retained by the Java VM to be made retrievable at run-time. It is possible to create meta-annotations out of the existing ones in Java.