Integrating an existing ORM – Hibernate and JPA

As defined by Wikipedia:

"Object-relational mapping (ORM, O/RM, and O/R mapping) in computer software is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages".

The popular adoption of ORM frameworks in Java such as Hibernate is largely due to the simplicity and diminution of code you need to write to persist and query data.

Making JPA available in Scala

Although Scala has its own modern standard for data persistence (that is, Slick, which we will introduce later on), in this section, we will cover a possible integration of JPA (Java Persistence API, documented at http://docs.oracle.com/javaee/6/tutorial/doc/bnbpz.html) within the Scala world by building an SBT project that uses JPA-annotated Scala classes to persist data in a relational database. It is derived from an online sample available at http://www.brainoverload.nl/scala/105/jpa-with-scala, which should be particularly interesting...