JavaOne: JPA 2.0 Likely New Features

I sat through a good session yesterday on where JPA is going. They are going to try to align it with the Java EE 6 timeframe which means unfortunately it will probably not be out in time for Oracle 11gR1 release, but these are good changes none the less. The more I get into JPA and the more I see, the fewer reasons I can see to go with Toplink or Hibernate over JPA. The tooling for JPA in JDeveloper is quite nice, and the ability to use annotations usually outweighs some of the things it's lacking.

Some of the new things coming for JPA 2.0:

• Collections of Basic types (string, integers, etc)
• Embeddable classes will be a little more flexible
• Unidirectional one-to-many relationships without a join table
  
• More options and some clarification of behavior of lazy collectioins in detached objects
• Improvements to JPQL
• Criteria API -- this would be a nice addition. Both Toplink and Hibernate have ways to programmatically build where clauses programmatically, right now the only option with JPA is piecing together JPQL
• Integration with JSR-303 for validation
• For example, imagine annotations as @Required, @Length(max=5), @Max(240), and even user-defined validation annotations

Sadly I am leaving this afternoon to head back home. JavaOne has been a lot of fun.