JPA 1 is not good enough

Question

Working in a medium size project during last 4 months - we are using JPA and Spring - I'm quite sure that JPA is not powerfull for projects that requires more than CRUD screen... Query interface is poor, Hibernate doesn't respect JPA spec all the time and lot of times I need to use hibernate classes, annotations and config. What do you guys think about JPA? Is it not good enough?

Answer 1

Well I think most of the time JPA is "good enough" but I miss the Criteria API a lot (only provided by Hibernate)

Answer 2

Well I can't provide specific guidance without knowing more about your particular case. It seems like you're using Hibernate's JPA implementation. You might try other JPA implementations if there is something about Hibernate's you don't like. As far as the query interface, if JPA's queries aren't doing what you want, you always have the ability to get a plain old Connection and work with that. The genius of the framework is that -- at the very least -- you don't have to write all the CRUD code ever again. I would never claim JPA is perfect, but it's better than hand-writing SQL all the time to do trivial things.

Answer 3

Sure any ORM is better than hand-writting SQL for CRUD operations... the thing is: I'm think there is no reason to use JPA instead pure Hibernate because I'm mixing both a lot. If I'm not getting a hidden provider why use JPA anyway?

Answer 4

One of the nice things about using JPA vs Hibernate Annotations is the automatic configuration and discovery of persistent classes. Also, it depends on how much of the time you need to break from using the JPA API, if you are only doing it 10% of the time, it would still make switching providers a lot easier than if you were to use hibernate for 100% of your queries.

Answer 5

Hibernate has been a long time in the road. That's why it has many functions not avaiable in JPA yet. But with time JPA will catch up. Until then, use JPA and Hibernate specific settings where necessary. If you need to switch later, it'll be a lot easier.

Answer 6

My advice would be simply to use Hibernate. Hibernate coupled with JPA annotations + Hibernate annotations is pretty powerful. You can even configure an EntityManagerFactory to autodiscover Entities on the classpath but then call getSessionFactory() to leverage the native Hibernate APIs in your application. If you are using Spring it's very easy to do this with LocalContainerEntityManagerFactoryBean and HibernateJpaVendorAdapter.

Answer 7

We combine JPA 2.0, Hibernate Core, Hibernate Search and Hibernate Validator via our in-house wrapper framework. It does everything we throw at it :)

Combine that with Maven and we have a database built for us too! Add DBUnit into the mix and you've got everything you need.

Wickedly fast searches via Lucene, but using Hibernate Criteria/HQL queries are very cool. All this power behind a GWT suggest box is great.