JPA 2.0 - What's coming

A presentation given by Mike Keith from Oracle (co-spec lead of JSR 220) last year at a local JUG meet brought up some interesting information about JPA 2.0. The goal of it is to fill out the standard from 80-90% to 95-98% and the way they plan to do this is to add the features most asked for by developers, which he did at an extended feedback session at the end of his presentation.

The most exciting features they're looking at introducing to JPA 2.0 are:

- Collections of 'basic' objects - like Strings, Dates etc.

- Ordered lists where order is maintained - e.g.

@ManyToMany @OrderColumn(name="EXECUTION_ORDER")
List rules;

- Enhanced query expressions - like Hibernate criteria queries.

I'm currently using JPA with Hibernate extensions, hopefully in the not-too-distant future we can switch to a single feature-rich JPA implementation.