JPA vs Hibernate

Many enterprise Java developers use lightweight persistent objects provided by open-source frameworks or Data Access Objects instead of entity beans: entity beans and enterprise beans had a reputation of being too heavyweight and complicated, and one could only use them in Java EE application servers. Many of the features of the third-party persistence frameworks were incorporated into the Java Persistence API, and as of 2006 projects like Hibernate (version 3.2) and Open-Source Version TopLink Essentials have become implementations of the Java Persistence API.

JPA is really a specification
Hibernate provides an implementation of the JPA specification. Vendors providing EJB3.0 containers will also be providing an implementation of the JPA spec, so that means Sun and IBM WebSphere and Oracle and all the other handsome players in the industry will provide an implementatio
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What is JPA?

JPA is a framework for managing relational data for Java. It can be used with applications utilizing JSE (Java Platform, Standard Edition) or JEE (Java Platform, Enterprise Edition). Its current version is JPA 2.0, which was released on 10 Dec, 2009. JPA replaced EJB 2.0 and EJB 1.1 entity beans (which were heavily criticized for being heavyweight by the Java developer community). Although entity beans (in EJB) provided persistence objects, many developers were used to utilizing relatively lightweight objects offered by DAO (Data Access Objects) and other similar frameworks instead. As a result, JPA was introduced, and it captured many of the neat features of the frameworks mentioned above


What is Hibernate?

Hibernate is a framework that can be used for object-relational mapping intended for Java programming language. More specifically, it is an ORM (object-relational mapping) library that can be used to map object-relational model in to conventional relational model. In simple terms, it creates a mapping between Java classes and tables in relational databases, also between Java to SQL data types. Hibernate can also be used for data querying and retrieving by generating SQL calls. Therefore, the programmer is relieved from the manual handling of result sets and converting objects. Hibernate is released as a free and open source framework distributed under GNU license. An implementation for JPA API is provided in Hibernate 3.2 and later versions.



What is the difference between JPA and Hibernate?

JPA is a framework for managing relational data in Java applications, while Hibernate is a specific implementation of JPA (so ideally, JPA and Hibernate cannot be directly compared). In other words, Hibernate is one of the most popular frameworks that implements JPA. Hibernate implements JPA through Hibernate Annotation and EntityManager libraries that are implemented on top of Hibernate Core libraries. Both EntityManager and Annotations follow the lifecycle of Hibernate. The newest JPA version (JPA 2.0) is fully supported by Hibernate 3.5. JPA has the benefit of having an interface that is standardized, so the developer community will be more familiar with it than Hibernate. On the other hand, native Hibernate APIs can be considered more powerful because its features are a superset of that of JPA.

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