JPA - Hibernate

Question

Can someone put in perspective the difference between JPA and Hibernate. Or are these complementary concepts, to be used together?

Answer 1

Roughly, JPA is a standard from the java community, here the specs, which has been implemented (and extended) by the Hibernate guys (some info here). Being a spec, you will not be using JPA directly, but a JPA implementation.

Beware that if you'll use the hibernate JPAs' extensions, you'll break the compatibility with other JPA implementations (though some will say "why you should use another JPA implementation?").

Answer 2

I will echo cheng81's comments and also put in a vote for using the plain Hibernate APIs. The feature set of JPA is smaller than Hibernate's and I see no reason to handicap yourself with "pure JPA" just because it's a "standard."