annotations - What is the use of marker interfaces in Java?

Question

When there is nothing to implement in the marker interfaces like Serializable What is the use of implementing it?

Answer 1

Joshua Bloch: Effective Java 2nd Edition, p 179

Item 37: Use marker interfaces to define types

... You may hear it said that marker annotations (Item 35) make marker interfaces obsolete. This assertion is incorrect. Marker interfaces have two advantages over marker annotations. First and foremost, marker interfaces define a type that is implemented by instances of the marked class; marker annotations do not. The existence of this type allows you to catch errors at compile time that you couldn’t catch until runtime if you used a marker annotation....

Personally I think I'll bow to Joshua's superior knowledge on this subject.