The EJB 3.0 Java Persistence API (JPA) was released in May 2006 as part of
the Java Enterprise Edition 5 (Java EE) platform, and it has already garnered
a great deal of attention and praise. What began as merely an easier-to-use
successor to the much-maligned container-managed persistence (CMP) portion of
the EJB component standard soon evolved into a full-blown incorporation of
the existing best practices of the most prominent and popular
object-relational (O-R) persistence products in use. The result is that
applications now have a modern standard for lightweight enterprise Java
persistence that they can use in any compliant Java EE 5 application server,
or in Java Standard Edition (SE) applications.
The Spring application framework has been in existence for four years, and it
has become a popular choice both in an application server context and
standalone. Like ... (more)