Android Dagger 2 Generated annotation JSR250

When you’re using Dagger 2.0 in your Android projects, you’ll quickly realize you need to include an additional dependency to provide the @Generated annotation (from JSR-250). [**]

These are the common options typically seen in online Dagger examples:

1. javax.annotation:jsr250-api:1.0
2. org.glassfish:javax.annotation:10.0-b28
3. javax.annotation:javax.annotation-api:1.2

So which one should you use?

Let’s do a quick comparison of the 3 jars:

1. javax.annotation:jsr250-api:1.0

   • Jar file size: 5.7kb
   • Date of javax directory: Apr 27, 2006
   • License: https://glassfish.java.net/public/CDDLv1.0.html
   • Created-By: 1.5.0_05-b05 (Sun Microsystems Inc.)

2. org.glassfish:javax.annotation:10.0-b28

   • Jar file size: 20kb
   • Date of javax directory: Oct 8, 2008
   • License: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/nonav/public/CDDL+GPL.html
   • Created-By: Apache Maven Bundle Plugin

3. javax.annotation:javax.annotation-api:1.2

   • Jar file size: 26kb
   • Date of javax directory: Apr 26, 2013
   • Created-By: Created-By: 1.7.0_09 (Oracle Corporation)
   • License: https://glassfish.dev.java.net/nonav/public/CDDL+GPL.html

So the second contains slightly more meta-data files and a different license (includes GPL) than the first option, but otherwise they contain essentially the same content - e.g. the same .class files.

The third one contains a few extra annotations, including: @ManagedBean, @Priority, but is pretty much the same as the second one.

Verdict: use the first/oldest one: javax.annotation:jsr250-api:1.0

Final note: when you include the dependency in your android project, use the provided scope instead of compile, to prevent the JSR-250 annotations from being distributed with your app, in other words:

dependencies {
    compile 'com.google.dagger:dagger:2.0.1'
    provided 'javax.annotation:jsr250-api:1.0'
    apt 'com.google.dagger:dagger-compiler:2.0.1'
}

** PS. if you don’t include one of these JSR-250 jars in your project, you’ll get this compile error in one of the files generated by dagger-compiler:

Error:(17, 24) error: package javax.annotation does not exist
Error:(20, 2) error: cannot find symbol class Generated
Error:(21, 14) error: dagger.internal.codegen.ComponentProcessor was unable to process this class because not all of its dependencies could be resolved. Check for compilation errors or a circular dependency with generated code.