JPA is a specification and Hibernate is a JPA implementation. I have used hibernate in one of my project but not as a JPA provider. That means I have worked with the simple SessionFactory, Session, Transaction , the hibernate core API.

Is it mandatory to use JPA in most of the real world project when we use any ORM technology like Hibernate or IBatis ? Without using JPA specification ORM can't be used or are not used in real world application?

Hi,
no you don't have to use JPA: many users prefer to stick to the Hibernate API.