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When writing an annotation-based framework, you many times have the need to find all classes that use a specific annotation at deployment time to initialize your framework. For example, the EJB 3.0 deployer needs to know which classes are annotated with @Stateless, @Stateful, and @MessageDriven, so it can create a container for each of those classes. For JPA, it needs to find a given set of classes within an archive that are annotated with @Entity so that it can define its ORM mapping. This scanning for annotations can be done at runtime using various techniques and open source libraries. I want to discuss how to do this in my blog and point you to a small project I created at sourceforge to help out with this.