I am pleased to announce a number of recent milestones for JSR 308, Annotations on Java Types:

Adoption of JCP 2.8

Thanks to the agreement of the Expert Group, JSR 308 operates under JCP 2.8 from September 2012.

There is a publicly archived mailing list for EG members, and a companion list for anyone who wishes to follow EG traffic by email. There is also a "suggestion box" mailing list where anyone can send feedback to the E.G. directly. Feedback will be discussed on the main EG list.

Co-spec lead Prof. Michael Ernst maintains an issue tracker and a document archive.

Early-Access Builds of the Reference Implementation

Oracle has published binaries for all platforms of JDK 8 with support for type annotations.

Builds are generated from OpenJDK's type-annotations/type-annotations forest (notably the langtools repo). The forest is owned by the Type Annotations project.

Integration with Enhanced Metadata

On the enhanced metadata mailing list, Oracle has proposed support for repeating annotations in the Java language in Java SE 8. For completeness, it must be possible to repeat annotations on types, not only on declarations. The implementation of repeating annotations on declarations is already in the type-annotations/type-annotations forest (and hence in the early-access builds above) and work is underway to extend it to types.