The aim of the new Java Persistence API is to simplify the development of persistent entities. It meets this objective through a simple POJO-based persistence model that reduces the number of required classes and interfaces.

Mapping database tables with Java objects can be cumbersome, so we have first shown here a quick reverse engineering solution, which is available in the Eclipse development environment. In the latter part of this chapter, we have added a session bean facade to our entities and tested it with a Java standalone client.

In the next chapter, we will further enhance our example application by introducing a web project that controls user interaction