Title: Intro
<a name="Intro"></a>

Apache OpenJPA is a Java persistence project at [The Apache Software Foundation](http://apache.org)
 that can be used as a stand-alone [POJO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POJO)
 persistence layer or [integrated](integration.html)
 into any Java EE compliant container and many other lightweight frameworks, such as Tomcat and Spring.

The [3.1.x releases](downloads.html) target [JSR-338 Java Persistence 2.2](http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=338).
They require Java8 and support the java.time API natively amongst other nice features.
Apache OpenJPA-3.1.x is fully backward compatible to our JPA-2.0 and JPA-1.0 releases.

The [2.x releases](downloads.html)
(2.4.3 is the latest) are a production ready, compliant implementation of the [JSR-317 Java Persistence 2.0](http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=317)
specification, which is backwards compatible to the JPA 1.0 specification and passes the Sun JPA 2.0 Technology Compatibility Kit.

The [1.x releases](downloads.html)
 (1.2.2 is the latest) are a production ready, feature-rich, compliant
implementation of the Java Persistence API (JPA) 1.0 part of the [JSR-220 Enterprise Java Beans 3.0](http://jcp.org/en/jsr/detail?id=220)
 specification, which pass the Sun JPA 1.0b Technology Compatibility Kit.