Chapter 19. Introduction to the Java Persistence API

The Java Persistence API provides Java developers with an object/relational mapping facility for managing relational data in Java applications. Java Persistence consists of four areas:

• The Java Persistence API

• The query language

• The Java Persistence Criteria API

• Object/relational mapping metadata

The following topics are addressed here:

• “Entities” on page 333

• “Entity Inheritance” on page 345

• “Managing Entities” on page 349

• “Querying Entities” on page 355

• “Further Information about Persistence” on page 355

Entities

An entity is a lightweight persistence domain object. Typically, an entity represents a table in a relational database, and each entity instance corresponds to ...

Get The Java EE 6 Tutorial: Basic Concepts, Fourth Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.

Start your free trial