JDO Vs. EJB3 Vs. JPA
Enterprise Java Beans 3.0 (EJB3) specification also covered persistence, as had EJB v2 with Entity Beans. There has been standards conflict between the two standards bodies in terms of pre-eminence. JDO has several commercial implementations.
In the end, persistence has been "broken out" of "EJB3 Core", and a new standard formed, the Java Persistence API (JPA). JPA uses the javax.persistence package, and was first specified in a separate document within the EJB3 spec JSR 220, but was later moved to its own spec JSR 317. Significantly, javax.persistence will not require an EJB container, and thus will work within a Java SE environment as well, as JDO always has. JPA, however, is an object-relational mapping (ORM) standard, while JDO is both an object-relational mapping standard and a transparent object persistence standard. JDO, from an API point of view, is agnostic to the technology of the underlying datastore, whereas JPA is targeted to RDBMS datastores (although there are several JPA providers that support access to non-relational datastores through the JPA API, such as DataNucleus and ObjectDB).
Leading JDO commercial implementations and open source projects also offer a JPA API implementation as an alternative access to their underlying persistence engines, formerly exposed solely via JDO in the original products. There are many open source implementations of JDO.
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