Preface

EclipseLink provides specific annotations (EclipseLink extensions) in addition to supporting the standard Java Persistence Architecture (JPA) annotations. You can use these EclipseLink extensions to take advantage of EclipseLink's extended functionality and features within your JPA entities.

Audience

This document is intended for application developers who want to develop applications using EclipseLink with Java Persistence Architecture (JPA). This document does not include details about related common tasks, but focuses on EclipseLink functionality.

Developers should be familiar with the concepts and programming practices of

Java SE and Java EE.
Java Persistence Architecture 2.0 specification (http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=317)
Eclipse IDE (http://www.eclipse.org)

Conventions

The following text conventions are used in this document:

Convention	Meaning
boldface	Boldface type indicates graphical user interface elements associated with an action, or terms defined in text or the glossary.
italic	Italic type indicates book titles, emphasis, or placeholder variables for which you supply particular values.
`monospace`	Monospace type indicates commands within a paragraph, URLs, code in examples, text that appears on the screen, or text that you enter.