jpa independent custom type mapping / javax.persistence.x alternative to org.hibernate.annotations.Type and org.hibernate.annotations.TypeDef

Question

I have a table GameCycle in a db that holds a column date of type number. The values in this column are 8-digit numbers representing a

Answer 1

No. Current version of JPA specification doesn't support custom type mappings. It's one of the most wanted features for future JPA 2.1.

If you really want to get rid of Hibernate-specific annoations, the only thing you can do is to map your field as String and perform necessary conversion manually (in getters/setters).

But in practice almost every large JPA-based application uses some implementation-specific features of persistence provider, therefore I don't think that avoiding dependency on Hibernate in this case really matters.