OpenJPA is an implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA), and is available under the terms of the Apache Software License. OpenJPA can be used as a stand-alone POJO persistence layer, or it can be integrated into any EJB3.0 compliant container and many lightweight frameworks. In this interview, Patrick Linskey explains where OpenJPA came from, how it fits into the Object\Relational Mapping space, the differentiating features that OpenJPA provides, the JPA specification, and future plans for OpenJPA.
Watch OpenJPA and the JPA specification with Patrick Linskey (21 minutes).
From the interview:
OpenJPA is an Apache Project in the incubator right now, we are working on getting into a full fledged Apache project as we speak and it's a code base that came to BEA from the BEA\SolarMetric acquisition. So it came from the Kodo codebase which has been around for about four and a half, five years solving object\relational mapping problems and we started the OpenJPA project from that code within BEA about 9 months ago, in the spring of 2006 and we got the initial code drop out there over the summer in June or July; we have been pretty actively working on getting it fully up-to-speed and getting people out there, getting people using it, getting projects adopting it and what not.
The goals of the project are to be a fully compliant, compelling JPA implementation for primarily object\relational mapping use. The project itself is a subset of what is available in BEA's Kodo product and so from a BEA standpoint we made the decision to contribute a lot of the bits in OpenJPA when we were looking at how best to work with the open source community as part of BEA's blended strategy; the OpenJPA came out of that and within the Apache community our goals are to have high performance, top-notch enterprise grade, object\relational mapping framework, that people can use in any environment.