Why ormlite has its own annotations?

Question

From what I see in ormlite it has implemented its annotations as well as JPA standard annotations. First of all, what was the reason of designing new set of annotations? Secondly, how one can use standard annotation like @Entity, etc instead of ormlite specific annotations. Right now, I am getting not defined error for those entities. Do I need a jar file?

Answer 1

@DataNucleus is correct. ORMLite is not a fully compliant JPA implementation. There are many features of ORMLite that do not map well with the JPA annotations and it was easier to create my own set. JPA is also a very large specification and I didn't want a large percentage of the annotations to generate UnsupportedOperationException or jut fail quietly. Lastly, I was trying to write a ORM library with 0 dependencies.

All that said, I am interested in improving ORMLite's JPA compatibility so if you have any suggestions on how to make it better, please send them to the developers mailing list. I'd love to improve it.

Answer 2

Because it isn't a real JPA implementation, and just makes use of JPA annotations for convenience. Obviously, by using it, you lose the portability offered by JPA itself, but then it may have some advantages for very specific situations