Hibernate / EclipseLink Interview questions
What is the difference between EclipseLink and Hibernate?
Both are mature, widely used JPA providers, and for standard JPA-compliant code, the two are largely interchangeable. The differences that matter show up mostly in defaults, native extensions, and heritage.
| EclipseLink | Hibernate |
| Reference implementation of Jakarta Persistence. | The most widely adopted JPA provider, predates the JPA spec itself (originally its own API). |
| Shared (L2) cache enabled by default, no external dependency needed. | Second-level cache disabled by default, requires an external provider. |
| Also natively supports XML (MOXy), SDO, and DBWS beyond relational persistence. | Focused specifically on relational ORM; XML/JSON handled by separate tools. |
| Native session/UnitOfWork API inherited from TopLink. | Native Session API inherited from its own pre-JPA history. |
In practice, the choice often comes down to ecosystem familiarity and specific extension needs rather than a clear technical winner: Hibernate has a larger community and more third-party integration examples, while EclipseLink's status as the reference implementation and its multi-format support (relational plus XML/JSON plus SDO under one metadata model) appeals to teams that value spec fidelity or need those additional formats.
Which framework's second-level cache is enabled by default without an external dependency?
A capability EclipseLink offers natively that Hibernate does not focus on is:
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