Using Spring Data JPA for persistence

In this section, readers will learn what JPA is, as well as how Spring Data JPA helps simplify the development of applications with database persistence.

Understanding the Java Persistence API (JPA)

JPA provides object/relation mapping capabilities to enable mapping between relational database tables and Java objects in order to ease persistence in Java applications. JPA consists of the following features:

• A query language to enable querying from relational database tables in order to retrieve Java objects
• A JPA Criteria API, which can be used to generate queries dynamically
• A set of metadata defined with XML Java annotations in order to successfully map relational database table columns...