Proccessing Annotations and design problem

Hi Experts,

I have a problem in designing an Api

I define a bunch of annotations for my value objects at runtime, currently I have a AnnotationUtil class in which read all fields of the given classes and put the field name and its annotation in a Map structure so whenever I need to know the annotation for a field I obtain it through that Map

but I think this is not a good design and it's really simple and if I add or make any change in my annotation the util class should be revised

I want to know if there is any design pattern to process annotations,

I want to know how Apis like hibernate will handle their annotations

any suggestion or comment would be of great help

thank you very much in advance

[757 byte] By [java1357a] at [2007-11-27 6:57:09]