So I'm writing a simple application and rather then fumble my way through it I wanted to see if someone can give advice on how to set this up. 

I have a wicket app, that I'm basically going to do something like a forum app (I've been looking at the wicket guestbook example) however I want to persist these messages to a database. I would like to use a listview (or maybe a repeater) to display the messages. I have created the db (mysql) and tables, and created entity objects for them. 

What is a best practice for interfacing wicket with the db. I think I need a loadabledetachablemodel but I'm open to suggestions. 

Should I create a class that implements the loadabledetachable interface and do my transactions to the database in that class? Should I do a DAO? and load in the data in the model by calling methods in the DAO? I've been looking at examples and I'm confused on how to do this. I am already learning wicket and the whole JPA stuff so I really don't want to throw something like Spring on this. I need to be able to add/update/delete and I'm just trying to figure out where is the best place to do this. 

Any help or guidance is appreciated.