title: JPA vs ORM vs Hibernate?
body: <p>I have read about them through various resources. Importants ones are :-</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li>Wikipedia article about each of them</li>
  <li><a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9881611/whats-the-difference-between-jpa-and-hibernate">What&#39;s the difference between JPA and Hibernate?</a></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>Here is my understanding about whats the  difference b/w them. I am not sure if i am right about JPA vs ORM</p>
  
  <ol>
  <li><p><strong>ORM:</strong> Object Relational Mapping is concept/process of converting the data from  Object oriented language to relational DB and vice versa
  For example in   java its done with the help of reflection and jdbc.</p></li>
  <li><p><strong>Hibernate:</strong> Its the implementation of above concept.</p></li>
  <li><p><strong>JPA:</strong> Its the one step above ORM. Its high level API and specification so that different ORM tools can implement so that it provides
  the flexibility to developer to change the implementation from one ORM to another (for example if application uses the JPA api and implementaion
  is hibernate. In future it can switch to IBatis if required. But on the other if application directly lock the implementation with
  Hibernate without JPA platform, switiching is going to be herculean task)</p></li>
  </ol>
  
  <p>There can be ORM implementation with/without JPA specification.For example as per this <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_Persistence_API#Hibernate" rel="noreferrer">link</a> under hibernate section only 
  Hibernate versions 3.2 and later provide an implementation for the Java Persistence API</p>