JPA is annotation based OR mapping. It is very powerful as the annotation binds a datastore to JAVA classes. These objects are datastore context aware. The JPA library manages the write\/update to the objects.<\/p>\n
The EntityManager class has many methods. There are two methods that concerns most of datastore operations and their usage are:<\/p>\n
merge<\/strong>() – does a select to check if the entity exists so that it can do update. Any detached JPA entity must be merged. If persist() is used instead, then a new entity is created in the store.<\/p>\n persist<\/strong>() – deos not do select and does insert with generated ID. This is for persisting new object into a datastore.<\/p>\n In an application, persistable objects can be independently grouped so that they can be treated separately. They may be grouped within a different DAO object. JPA introduces the idea of a persistence-unit. A persistence-unit provides a convenient way of specifying a set of metadata files, and classes, and jars that contain all classes to be persisted in a grouping. The persistence-unit is named, and the name is used for identifying it.<\/p>\n Persistence Unit<\/em> should be used so that a group of classes may be stored in different stores. This is very powerful way of designing an application that has lets say, structured (SQL), or documents (NoSQL) based data stores.<\/p>\nPersistence Unit<\/h2>\n
Reference<\/h2>\n
\n