How does Spring Data JPA differ from Hibernate for large projects?

Question

I am having a hard time deciding if I should stick with Hibernate for a new project, or get my feet wet with JPA and the new Spring Data implementation.

Is the Spring Data framework intended for large projects or small projects with modest query requirements?

While I certainly see the advantage in code reduction by using the @Query annotation, what do you do for dynamic queries? What about when you want to implement a save() method that's quite complex?

The documentation says to make a Custom interface and implementation that your main repository implements, but what if you need to access any super methods on the crud repository itself? The crud repository implements the custom one - not the other way around. It seems like an odd design.

I am very uncertain whether this framework will meet the challenges of complex and large applications. I've never ran into many problems with Hibernate, and I'm considering sticking with the good old reliable rather than go with Spring Data JPA.

What should I do? What unforeseen complications and costs will I encounter if I go with Spring Data JPA?

Answer 1

So, spring-data does some extra magic that helps with complex queries. It is strange at first and you totally skip it in the docs but it is really powerful and useful.

It involves creating a custom Repository and a custom `RepositoryImpl' and telling Spring where to find it. Here is an example:

Configuration class - point to your still-needed xml config with annotation pointing to your repositories package (it looks for *Impl classes automatically now):

@Configuration
@EnableJpaRepositories(basePackages = {"com.examples.repositories"})
@EnableTransactionManagement
public class MyConfiguration {
}

jpa-repositories.xml - tell Spring where to find your repositories. Also tell Spring to look for custom repositories with the CustomImpl file name:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<beans xmlns="http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans" xmlns:jpa="http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/jpa"
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:util="http://www.springframework.org/schema/util"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/mongo http://www.springframework.org/schema/data/jpa/spring-jpa.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans http://www.springframework.org/schema/beans/spring-beans.xsd
    http://www.springframework.org/schema/util http://www.springframework.org/schema/util/spring-util.xsd">

<jpa:repositories base-package="com.example.repositories" repository-impl-postfix="CustomImpl" />

</beans>