Jakarta Persistence project

Jakarta Persistence defines the industry standard for management of persistence and object/relational mapping in Java® environments. It is the most widely used persistence solution in the Java ecosystem and by far the most successful object/relational mapping API in any programming language.

This specification was originally developed by the Java Community Process and was known as JPA (the Java Persistence API) prior to it being made open source and donated to the Eclipse Foundation.

The current release is Jakarta Persistence 3.2. Compatible open source implementations include EclipseLink 5 and Hibernate ORM 7.

Jakarta Persistence 4.0 is a major revision of the specification and is currently under very active development with release targeted for late 2026.

The latest information and milestone builds may be found at:

https://jakartaee.github.io/persistence/

In particular, the last drafts of the specification are available in PDF and HTML format, along with Javadoc API documentation.

Jakarta Persistence 4 is designed to work hand in hand with:

• Java SE 21 and JDBC
• Jakarta Data
• Jakarta Query
• Jakarta Validation
• Jakarta Transactions
• CDI
• The entire Jakarta EE platform

The Persistence specification integrates with the EE platform and other Jakarta EE technologies but does not require them. Implementations of Jakarta Persistence are able to operate inside or outside of a container environment, and in practice Jakarta Persistence is extremely widely used outside of the Jakarta EE platform.

License

• Most of the Jakarta Persistence project source code is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) v2.0 and Eclipse Distribution License (EDL) v1.0.; see the license information at the top of each source file.
• The source code for the Jakarta Persistence Specification project is licensed under the Eclipse Public License (EPL) v2.0 and GNU General Public License (GPL) v2 with Classpath Exception; again, the license is in each source file.
• The binary jar files published to the Maven repository are licensed under the same licenses as the corresponding source code; see the file META-INF/LICENSE.txt in each jar file.

You’ll find the text of the licenses in the workspace in various LICENSE.txt or LICENSE.md files. Don’t let the presence of these license files in the workspace confuse you into thinking that they apply to all files in the workspace.

You should always read the license file included with every download and read the license text applying to each source file.

Contributing

We have a contribution policy, which means we can only accept contributions under the terms of the Eclipse Contributor Agreement.