Java Persistence API
JPA, or Java Persistence API, is a Java specification for accessing, persisting, and managing data between Java objects and relational databases. It provides a set of interfaces and annotations that define a standard way to map Java objects to database tables and perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations on those objects.
Here are some key concepts and features of JPA:
- Entity: An entity is a Java class that represents a database table. It is typically annotated with
@Entity
to mark it as an entity class. Each entity instance corresponds to a row in the database table. - EntityManager: EntityManager is an interface that provides methods for interacting with the persistence context, which represents the collection of managed entities. It is responsible for persisting, retrieving, updating, and deleting entities from the database.
- Persistence Unit: A persistence unit is a set of entity classes that are managed together as a unit. It is defined in a persistence.xml file and specifies the configuration settings for the EntityManagerFactory.
- EntityManagerFactory: EntityManagerFactory is a factory class that creates EntityManager instances. It is typically created once for the entire application and used to create EntityManager instances as needed.
- Primary Key: Each entity class must have a primary key field, which uniquely identifies each entity instance. The
@Id
annotation is used to mark a field as the primary key, and additional annotations such as@GeneratedValue
can be used to specify how the primary key values are generated. - Relationships: JPA supports various types of relationships between entities, such as one-to-one, one-to-many, and many-to-many. These relationships are defined using annotations such as
@OneToOne
,@OneToMany
, and@ManyToMany
. - JPQL: JPQL (Java Persistence Query Language) is a query language similar to SQL but operates on entity objects rather than database tables. It allows developers to write platform-independent queries that are translated into SQL by the JPA provider at runtime.
- Criteria API: The Criteria API provides a type-safe and programmatic way to create queries using a fluent interface. It allows developers to dynamically construct queries at runtime based on various criteria.
- Transaction Management: JPA supports transaction management to ensure data consistency and integrity. Transactions are typically managed using annotations such as
@Transactional
, which define the boundaries of database transactions.
Overall, JPA simplifies database access in Java applications by providing a unified and standardized approach to object-relational mapping. It abstracts away the details of JDBC and SQL, allowing developers to focus on working with domain objects and writing expressive and maintainable code.
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