I\'m looking to make my code more readable as well as use tooling like IDE code inspection and/or static code analysis (FindBugs and Sonar) to avoid NullPointerExceptions.
I use the IntelliJ one, because I'm mostly concerned with IntelliJ flagging things that might produce a NPE. I agree that it's frustrating not having a standard annotation in the JDK. There's talk of adding it, it might make it into Java 7. In which case there will be one more to choose from!