Pro JPA 2: Mastering the Java™ Persistence API

Chapter 6. Entity Manager

Entities do not persist themselves when they are created. Nor do they remove themselves from the database when they are garbage-collected. It is the logic of the application that must manipulate entities to manage their persistent lifecycle. JPA provides the EntityManager interface for this purpose in order to let applications manage and search for entities in the relational database.

At first, this might seem like a limitation of JPA. If the persistence runtime knows which objects are persistent, why should the application have to be involved in the process? Rest assured that this design is both deliberate and far more beneficial to the application than any transparent persistence solution. Persistence is a partnership ...