Hi.

I'm beginning a new project with Hibernate but I'm confused about native and JPA apis.

What is the advantage, if any, of using native API instead of JPA?

My project is quite standard: customers, invoices... I'll be using Sping container for DI and transaction management.

Thank you.

Using JPA API only will make your application implementation independent. You will be able to change JPA provider in case Hibernate will frustrate you.

Spring container is obsolete and heavy :)

Thanks r.


That is an advantage for JPA. Does native Hibernate offer extra functionality? Any power feature? Increased performance? Or do both native Hibernate and JPA just map each other?


Could you recommend an alternative to Spring container? I require simple web container: no application server, no EJBs, no JEE container, no extra and heavy add-ons i will never use.

Could you also recommend an alternative for managing transactions? I like the way Spring isolates my application for the underlying environment, actually I understand that using Spring I can manage transaction pretty much the way JTA does but having it outside the application server and without using JNDI. Maybe native Hibernate transaction handling?

Thanks again.

Spring Core (BeanFactory) is wonderful.

It gives you modularity & configurability.. rather than having to hard-code configuration and write a bunch of glue code/ init crud, with order-of-init issues, to run at startup.

What's not to like?

In the web domain I use only Spring Core and Spring MVC, skip the rest. Not heavy at all.