JPA is fine, if and only if you've got a framework managing the entity manager lifecycle for you in a reasonable way. In my opinion if I need an entire separat

JPA is fine, if and only if you've got a framework managing the entity manager lifecycle for you in a reasonable way. In my opinion if I need an entire separate framework (or container) to manage it, I think its broken. I've switched to Ebean for Java ORM and am vastly happier now. JPA also gets the award for the worst programmatic query building API I've ever seen. As a result it seems like the majority of people just use JPQL strings which is really annoying as its also SQL but not quite SQL.