How to use enums with JPA

Question

I have an existing database of a film rental system. Each film has a has a rating attribute. In SQL they used a constraint to limit the allowed values of this attribute.

Answer 1

The problem is, I think, that JPA was never incepted with the idea in mind that we could have a complex preexisting Schema already in place.

I think there are two main shortcomings resulting from this, specific to Enum:

1. The limitation of using name() and ordinal(). Why not just mark a getter with @Id, the way we do with @Entity?
2. Enum's have usually representation in the database to allow association with all sorts of metadata, including a proper name, a descriptive name, maybe something with localization etc. We need the easy of use of an Enum combined with the flexibility of an Entity.

Help my cause and vote on JPA_SPEC-47