"norman.richards(a)jboss.com" wrote : Even when using JPA, it is still possible to reach down to get Hibernate if you need something from it. (assuming Hibernate is your persistence provider, that is) I think I'd always start with the JPA interfaces. what do you mean by "reach down to get Hibernate" exactly? Are you talking about using the javax.persistence.Session interface directly as required in a class and importing the appropriate package/interface? so in other words, use JPA (e.g. EntityManager) most of the time unless you need a method that JPA api does not provide but Hibernate API does? View the original post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=viewtopic&p=4121962#... Reply to the post : http://www.jboss.com/index.html?module=bb&op=posting&mode=reply&a...