JPA 2.0 Frustration

JPA 2.0 is one of the areas where Java EE 6 can make your life a lot easier compared to Java EE 5 - at least if your life is somehow connected to Java software development.

So much for the marketing blurb. In practice, working with JPA 2.0 means

• trying to understand a specification (JSR 317) which may be quite challenging to read for the average developer and occasionally somewhat too vague even for experts
• making sense of obscure stack traces from the JPA provider of your choice
• discovering numerous bugs and omissions in implementations claiming to be JPA 2.0 compliant.

If you think this sounds fun, then read on...

Actually, this post is just an introductory note to a series of articles on specific use cases that seem to be particularly hard to get right.

I'm not unhappy about the spec as such - Object Relational Mapping (ORM) is a challenging topic and not exactly the stuff you expect first year computer science students to understand. JPA 2.0 narrows the gap between the JPA standard and vendor-specific extensions or native ORM features.

Still, there are some areas not covered by the standard where you have to fall back to vendor extensions or even write your own code: for instance, I would really like to see more flexible support for enum types, a standard for user-defined column types and an addition for spatial objects and queries, based on OGC standards.

The main source of frustration with JPA 2.0 is simply the lack of specification compliance of the available implementations. Implementing any but the most trivial persistence mappings and queries at application level can require hours of trial and error to get the expected results. Yes, most of the time the problem may be in your application code. But with JPA 2.0, chances are really high that your persistence provider has a bug.

The situation is not helped by the policy of Sun/Oracle/the JCP (I'm not really sure who's in charge of that) to keep the JPA TCK (Technology Compliance Kit) under a non-disclosure agreement - see this blog post from DataNucleus, which was linked in a related thread in the Glassfish forums recently. (DataNucleus is a JPA implementor not beloging to the inner circle of the JCP.)

So far, I've looked at

• Hibernate
• Eclipselink
• OpenJPA
• DataNucleus,

and sadly, I've had problems with all of them. I'm going to provide specific examples in the following posts.