Why maven does not support jpa 2.0?

Question

As far as I know JPA 2.0 has been approved as final in December 2009.

But the central repository gives the pom file declaration for 1.0.2 and 3.0-public_review.

So how can I use the current version of JPA 2.x using maven?

Answer 1

JPA itself is just the API definition, you'll need a provider who has implemented the API. I tend to use hibernate but there are others such as EclipseLink or OpenJPA. If you stick to just the core JPA functionality then you'll be able to swap providers at a later date easily enough.

Your choice of provider may be influenced if you're using a particular EE application server. JPA is part of the EE spec now but each server uses a different provider. E.G. JBoss uses hibernate while glassfish uses EclipseLink I believe.

With that in mind this is how I declare my hibernate dependency in my pom.xml.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
  <artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>
  <version>4.2.8.Final</version>
</dependency>

This will automatically pull in the JPA 2.0 API jar along with other dependencies such as validation.