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Programming for JPA integration
The Java™ Persistence API (JPA) is a specification that allows mapping Java objects to relational databases. JPA contains a full object-relational mapping (ORM) specification using Java language metadata annotations, XML descriptors, or both to define the mapping between Java objects and a relational database. A number of open-source and commercial implementations are available.
To use JPA, you must have a supported JPA provider, such as OpenJPA or Hibernate, JAR files, and a META-INF/persistence.xml file in your class path.