Recently I ranted about EJB3 @NamedQuery annotations as being a bad use of annotations.
Turns out I was mistaken about the lack of pros—startup-time validation of queries seems like an admirable goal.
However, I would propose a different implementation: instead of the “name” part of the query being in an non-referrable annotation, the annotation should be used solely as a marker on an otherwise pure Java construct. For example:
@Sql
private static final String FIND_FOO = "select * from foo ...";
public Lis<Foo> findFoo() {
Query q = em.createQuery(FIND_FOO);
q.setParameter(...);
return q.getResultList();
}This would alleviate my concerns about type-safety and SQL encapsulation, but still allow the EntityManager to find all of the annotated queries on startup for validation.
Until my proposal makes it into EJB4 (haha), I also came across this comment, which seems like an acceptable, though verbose, compromise with the current annotation.