The java persistence api is the java api for the management of persistence and object/relational mapping for java ee and java se environments.

the goal of this specification is to provide an object/relational mapping facility for the java application developer using a java domain model to manage a relational database.

persistence in this context covers three areas:
- the api itself, defined in the javax.persistence package.
- the java persistence query language (jpql).
- object/relational metadata.
the java persistence 2.0 specification addresses improvements in the areas of domain modeling, object/relational mapping, entitymanager and query interfaces, and the java persistence query language. it adds an api for criteria queries, a metamodel api, and support for validation.

this package contains only api of jsr-317 spec. apache openjpa and eclipselink are implementations of this spec.