Referencing runmodes in Java

There was a question at this year’s AdaptTo, why there is no Java annotation to actually limit the scope of a component (imagine a servlet) to a specific runmode. This would allow you to specify in Java code, that a servlet is only supposed on run on author.

Technically it is easily possible to implement such an annotation. But it’s not done for a reason. Because runmodes have been developed as deployment vehicle to ship configuration. That means your deployment artefact can contain multiple configurations for the same component, and the decision which one to use is based on the runmode.
Runmodes are also not meant to be used as differentiator so code can operate differently based on this runmode. I would go so far to say, that the use of slingSettings.getRunModes() should be considered bad practice in AEM project code.

But of course the question remains, how one would implement the requirement that something must only be active on authoring (or any other environment, which can be expressed by runmodes). For that I would like to reference an earlier posting of mine. You still leverage runmodes, but this time via an indirection of OSGI configuration. This avoids hardcoding the runmode information in the java code.