Jakarta Persistence

Jakarta Persistence, also known as JPA (abbreviated from the former name Java Persistence API) is a Jakarta EE application programming interface specification that describes the management of relational data in enterprise Java applications. Persistence in this context covers three areas: The final release date of the JPA 1.0 specification was 11 May 2006 as part of Java Community Process JSR 220. The JPA 2.0 specification was released 10 December 2009 (the Java EE 6 platform requires JPA 2.0). The JPA 2.1 specification was released 22 April 2013 (the Java EE 7 platform requires JPA 2.1). The JPA 2.2 specification was released in the summer of 2017. The reference implementation for JPA 1 and 2 was EclipseLink. Jakarta Persistence 3.1 was released in the spring of 2022 as part of Jakarta EE 10. Jakarta Persistence 3.2 was released in spring 2024, targeting inclusion in Jakarta EE 11. EclipseLink and Hibernate are compatible implementations. A persistence entity is a lightweight Java class with its state typically persisted to a table in a relational database.