3.3.1 Adding Spring Data JPA to the project

Spring Data JPA is available to Spring Boot applications with the JPA starter. This starter dependency not only brings in Spring Data JPA but also transitively includes Hibernate as the JPA implementation, as shown here:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
</dependency>

If you want to use a different JPA implementation, then you’ll need to, at least, exclude the Hibernate dependency and include the JPA library of your choice. For example, to use EclipseLink instead of Hibernate, you’ll need to alter the build as follows:

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework.boot</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-boot-starter-data-jpa</artifactId>
  <exclusions>
    <exclusion>
      <groupId>org.hibernate</groupId>
      <artifactId>hibernate-core</artifactId>
    </exclusion>
  </exclusions>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.eclipse.persistence</groupId>
  <artifactId>org.eclipse.persistence.jpa</artifactId>
  <version>2.7.6</version>
</dependency>

Note that there may be other changes required, depending on your choice of JPA implementation. Consult the documentation of your chosen JPA implementation for details. Now let’s revisit your domain objects and annotate them for JPA persistence.