I always use Hibernate as my JPA2 provider - in both J2SE and J2EE.

However, the NetBeans support for Hibernate is very poor and the "Create Persistence Provider" or graphical editor for persistence.xml always insists that Hibernate only has JPA1 support.

Netbeans should support Hibernate as a JPA2 provider - if this means updating an ageing "Ant Library" then please do so.


Details follow...

My projects are all Maven based and the pom.xml entries amount to this (for a Derby backend)

        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.hibernate.javax.persistence</groupId>
            <artifactId>hibernate-jpa-2.0-api</artifactId>
            <version>1.0.1.Final</version>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
            <artifactId>hibernate-entitymanager</artifactId>
            <version>4.1.5.SP1</version>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.apache.derby</groupId>
            <artifactId>derby</artifactId>
            <version>10.9.1.0</version>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>
        <!-- consider using C3PO and ehcache -->
        <dependency>
            <!-- a dependency of Hibernate, which is locally managed -->
            <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>slf4j-jdk14</artifactId>
            <version>1.6.6</version>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>
        <dependency>
            <groupId>org.slf4j</groupId>
            <artifactId>jcl-over-slf4j</artifactId>
            <version>1.6.6</version>
            <scope>runtime</scope>
        </dependency>


I like to keep my J2SE persistence.xml very sparse and load properties from a properties file at runtime, e.g. containing

hibernate.dialect = org.hibernate.dialect.DerbyDialect
hibernate.connection.driver_class = org.apache.derby.jdbc.EmbeddedDriver
hibernate.connection.url = jdbc:derby:MYDBNAME;create=true
hibernate.connection.charSet = UTF-8

with a persistence.xml that usually looks like

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<persistence version="2.0" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/persistence/persistence_2_0.xsd">
  <persistence-unit name="MyPU" transaction-type="RESOURCE_LOCAL">
    <provider>org.hibernate.ejb.HibernatePersistence</provider>
    <!-- most properties are defined in jpa.properties -->
    <class>path.to.MyClass</class>
    <properties>
      <property name="hibernate.hbm2ddl.auto" value="create-drop"/>
    </properties>
  </persistence-unit>
</persistence>