Since the start of using annotations I was not a big fan of using @Override annotation. It seemed to have happened overnight, where after a new version of Eclipse was installed I was presented with 400+ warnings telling me to put in the dreaded overrides.
I do think that this seems unnecessary since it clutters the code a lot. But having lots of unresolved warnings in your IDE is even worse. Yes, I know that the compiler warnings can be fined tuned, but there might be a reason this warning comes on by default. So what is it?
As it turns out there are a few benefits. One is that the compiler will perform the check for you if you’ve specified the @Override annotation and will ensure that you are in fact overriding a method. This means that you no longer will have errors in your code where you’ve mistyped method name or have a slightly different signature. This is quite a benefit, since finding some of these errors can turn out to be quite time consuming.
The second benefit is that it will indicate to a fellow developer that this method indeed overrides (or implements) another method.
Well, there you have it. I am changing my stance on this subject and am willing to give the @Override a try.
