JPA without Spring (or any DI framework)

JPA is the ORM defined by the Java Community Process, that is to say, it is a JSR (317). Previously to JPA, there were a couple of ORM occupying the scene, like Hibernate or iBatis. So the community realized Java needed it's own ORM.

As any other JSR, the specification is defined through some documents, some interfaces and abstract classes, a couple of tests, etc., and let the vendors to implements the details. There are three main JPA implementations: Hibernate, EclipseLink and OpenJPA. 

The idea, as always, is to program using the specification (classes,interfaces, annotations, etc) and make the implementation available in the classpath so the details are resolved at runtime. That gives you the freedom to choose the implementation that fits better for your project or to change it without touching your source code.

I've been working with JPA for a couple of years in different projects, and most of the time it's configured through a dependency injection (DI) framework like Spring, where the EntityManager is injected in some DAO class.

Although using a DI framework may be the most appropriate approach for plumbing JPA in an enterprise scenario, it is very interesting to dig a bit and see what happens in the underground. This helps a lot to understand what is part of the specification and what is part of the salad of framework you are using.