ModelAttribute provides a simple alternative to Virtus for adding attributes to models. Its key advantage over Virtus is built-in dirty tracking, making ModelAttribute perfect for models that are backed by a web service.

Other features:

• Type casting and checking.
• Default values.
• Handles integers, booleans, strings and times - a set of types that are very easy to persist to and parse from JSON.
• Efficient serialization of attributes to JSON.
• Mass assignment - handy for initializers.