Is there such a version as JPA 3?

Question

AFAIK, the latest and greatest that I have been using is JPA 2.0.

I am befuddled that GAE has a jar somewhat called appengine-java-sdk-1.6.5/lib/user/orm/geronimo-jpa_3.0_spec-1.1.1.jar. I have been having the impression that GAE always has a latency in adopting compatibility with latest, greatest bleeding edge protocols. It took them some time to adopt JPA 2.0.

What is that JPA 3.0 jar doing inside GAE SDK libs? Is there such a version as JPA 3.0? Is Google one-upping us this time by implementing a new version protocol ahead of everyone else? Is there a JPA 3.0 spec or reference impl somewhere I could refer to?

I am not (currently) an EJB person (sorry ... had decided to avoid EJB ever since I had bad experience with EJB 1.0 10 years ago).

• Is EJB 3.0 synonymous with JPA 2.0,
• or is JPA 2.0 adopted as a subset of EJB 3.0
• or is JPA 3.0 = EJB 3.0?

WRT this question I asked: moving from Hibernate entitymanager 3.6.9 to 4.1.2 crashed mysql connection, Is Hibernate entity-manager 4.x somehow related to JPA 3.0 or at least a JPA version later than 2.0? I am experiencing significant differences between Hibernate entity-manager 3.x and 4.x (and have so far avoided deploying 4.x).

I realise this question is rather self-confusing and may be I should have asked each of the items as individual question, but I am hoping some one could tie all these together in a single thesis: ejb 3, JPA 2/3, geronimo, hibernate ent-mgr 3/4. Thanks.

Answer 1

No there is not such a thing (in June 2012) as JPA3. There is JPA1, JPA2, and (in planning) JPA2.1. That geronimo-specs jar is actually for JPA1 but some very shortsighted person/group decided to name it like that, and are now seeing the consequences of it.

As you say GAE already does support JPA2, using v2.x of their JPA plugin as available from Maven repositories or here http://code.google.com/p/datanucleus-appengine/ and that works with a compatible jpa-api v2 jar (such as geronimo-jpa_2.0_spec).