Since I am a newbie I dont know where should I look for this information and I see this would be a very common question and somewhere it mush have been answered. We are planning to use persistent layer and we are evaluating the options. We found that Hibernate is very popular tool and has lot of rich features. Now we have option of using JPA implementation or use pure hibernate implementation(use entityManager or SessionManager ). I am confused right now which one to go for. What makes pure hibernate better than JPA impl? Or whats not there in JPA impl that will force us to use Hibernate? Do you have any pointers for it?