Hi! My name is James Roper, and I am a software developer with a particular interest in open source development and trying new things. I program in Java, Scala, PHP, Python and Javascript, and I currently work for 
JPA 2.0 - New features - Part 1
A discussion based on my research of JPA 2 on the net
In my previous blog post I wrote about asking the JPA presenter at the Sun Tech Days if JPA will support collections of basic types. I've now done some research of my own and found that most of the features that I miss most in JPA, compared to Hibernate, will be in JPA.Let me start by saying that the first version of the Java Persistence API is excellent. Standardising three major competing vendors of ORM technologies, Hibernate, JDO and Toplink, into one standard would have been by no means an easy task. It certainly would have been an easy way out for the expert group to produce an API that included only the features they could agree on, but did not include many of the fundamental features of an ORM framework. I feel however that all the core aspects of ORM concepts have been addressed, the things that were left out were not essential. This is where JPA 2.0 comes in. Now that JPA has gained industry acceptance, it is time to fill the standard out, include all those nice to have features and clean it up around the edges.The JPA 2.0 specification has yet to be proposed as a JSR, so nothing that I'm about to mention is definitely going to be in there. All of the information I'm providing is based on presentations that I've read given by the people who will be involved in specifying JPA 2.0. In this article I will start us off by looking at the enhancements we can expect in collection mapping.