What is JPA

JPA means Java Persistence API & it is a framework used to manage the relational data in applications. JPA will allow programmers to change the traditional database approach by giving a newer way of accessing the database entities. 

in the normal database context, you will have a database created using mysql, sql or oracle & you gonna need to write queries to access the database entities & do whatever the transactions. but when the database is too large & the queries getting complex, the access will be time consuming & complex as well. So that developers needed a light weight method to access database objects in a faster way. Thats where the concept of JPA come in to play. 

Before JPA there were several persistence units such as  JDBC, ODB, JDO, etc. JPA combines all the best features of all & present in a sophisticated manner. Following are the comparison of JPA with others.

In JPA, the database objects are created & programmer access these objects not the database entities itself. As java is Object Oriented, this method is quite faster than traditional relational database approach. JPA will map the database entities to database objects so that you can access the data via the objects. There are many ORM methods such as openJPA, Hibernate, etc. 

To use JPA you need to import the package javax.persistence to your working environment.