I'm looking into making RIFE easier to setup through annotations. The plan is quite logically to mimic what the current builders (XML, Java, Groovy) do, but then with annotations.

I'm a bit stuck though with designing them, and this is mainly due to single element annotations. It feels to me that instead of relying on a fixed "value" element name, Java should automatically detect if there's a single element that hasn't got a default and use that.

Update: this issue is also under discussion at TheServerSide.

The problem

Why? Because "value" gives a conflicting semantic message when your annotation evolves and receives additional elements.