The Java EE 5 Tutorial, Third Edition: For Sun Java System Application Server Platform

24. Introduction to the Java Persistence API The Java Persistence API provides an object/relational mapping facility to Java developers for managing relational data in Java applications. Java Persistence consists of three areas: The Java Pe...

Entities An entity is a lightweight persistence domain object. Typically an entity represents a table in a relational database, and each entity instance corresponds to a row in that table. The primary programming artifact of an entity is the entit...

Managing Entities Entities are managed by the entity manager. The entity manager is represented by javax.persistence.EntityManager instances. Each EntityManager instance is associated with a persistence context. A persistence context defines the s...