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After kick-starting the Advanced Java course by discussing how to How to create and destroy objects, how to use methods common to all objects, how to design Classes and Interfaces and how and when to use generics, we are now going a step further.

In this lesson we will discuss enums (or enumerations) and annotations. The idea of enums is simple, but quite handy: it represents a fixed, constant set of values. What it means in practice is that enums are often used to design the concepts which have a constant set of possible states.

From the other side, annotations are a special kind of metadata which could be associated with different elements and constructs of the Java language. Interestingly, annotations have contributed a lot into the elimination of boilerplate XML descriptors used in Java ecosystem mostly everywhere. They introduced the new, type-safe and robust way of configuration and customization techniques.

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