Java Persistence/Persistence Products
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There are many persistence products to choose from. Most persistence products now support a JPA interface, although there still are some exceptions. Which product you use depends on your preference, but most people would recommend you use the JPA standard whichever product you choose. This gives you the flexibility to switch persistence providers, or port your application to another server platform which may use a different persistence provider.
Determining which persistence product to use involves many criteria. Valid things to consider include:
- Which persistence product does your server platform support and integrate with?
- What is the cost of the product, is it free and open source, can you purchase enterprise level support and services?
- Do you have an existing relationship with the company producing the product?
- Is the product active and does it have a large user base?
- How does the product perform and scale?
- Does the product integrate with your database platform?
- Does the product have active and open forums, do questions receive useful responses?
- Is the product JPA compliant, what functionality does the product offer beyond the JPA specification?
[edit] Existing Persistence Products
The following table summaries existing persistence products.[1]
| Product | JPA 1.0 | JPA 2.0 | JDO 2.0 | CMP 2.1 | Version | Year of Last Release | Open Source | Application Servers[2] | Forum Posts per Month[3] | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hibernate (Red Hat) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
Yes | JBoss | 450 | |||
| EclipseLink (Eclipse) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
Yes | OracleAS (11g), Oracle Weblogic (10.3), Glassfish (v3) | 71 + | |||
| TopLink (Oracle) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
OracleAS (11g), Oracle Weblogic (10.3) | 32 | |||
| OpenJPA (Apache) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
Yes | Geronimo, WebSphere Application Server (8.0) | 31 | |||
| DataNucleus (DataNucleus) | Yes | Yes | Yes |
|
|
Yes | Not published | |||
| TopLink Essentials (java.net) | Yes |
|
|
Yes | Glassfish (v2), SunAS (9), OracleAS (10.1.3) | 5 | ||||
| Kodo (Oracle) | Yes | Yes |
|
|
Oracle WebLogic (10.3) | 0 |
- ↑ Last updated 2010-03
- ↑ Application server that includes the product as their JPA implementation
- ↑ Number of user forum posts for 2010-02. Note this is only an estimate of community size and may be misleading due to several factors including users of open source products are more likely to post to forums, where as users of commercial products are more likely to use support. The estimate is also confused by the fact that some users post questions to generic EJB, JPA or ORM forums.
