beginnerJPA Fundamentals — The Specification, Providers & Architecture
What's the difference between JPA and Hibernate?
JPA is a specification — a set of interfaces and annotations with no executable logic of its own. Hibernate is one concrete implementation ('provider') of that specification, alongside EclipseLink and OpenJPA. Spring Boot uses Hibernate as its default JPA provider, which is why the two terms are often used loosely as if interchangeable, even though they're structurally distinct.
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