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The EclipseLink User Guide has not been updated since EclipseLink 1.0, is missing all the new query hints, persistence unit properties, annotations and new features, including no documentation on JPA 2.0. The documentation that is there is incomplete, and difficult to find, and seems to have things duplicated in different places, and multiple different naming and categorization schemes. http://wiki.eclipse.org/Developing_Applications_Using_EclipseLink_JPA_%28ELUG%29 >> Information pending Also the majority of the documentation is based on the Mapping Workbench and native EclipseLink API, not JPA. JPA users trying to read the documentation getting extremely confused. For example a common question is how to setup cache coordination. The docs says you need a sessions.xml and need to use the Mapping Workbench to define this. User attempt to do this, then get very confused given the sessions.xml is not used in JPA. The JPA documentation that is there is very brief, and basically states what the annotations are, but not why you would use them, or what use case they solve, or what issues need to be considered. Personally I think the lack of useful documentation is currently the #1 issue with EclipseLink.
EclipseLink JPA User Guide being re-developed: http://wiki.eclipse.org/EclipseLink/UserGuide/JPA
See new EclipseLink documentation, including JPA Extensions guide: http://eclipse.org/eclipselink/documentation
The new Extensions guide does provide documentation to all annotations, so is up to date. But it is still incomplete, in that it gives no context to why the annotations would be used, and does not document the concepts behind the features the annotations are part of the support for. It is still a very useful reference, but cannot be considered complete documentation. Also many features that are not reflected in annotation are not documented at all (events, history, custom sql, cache API, VPD), nor are the JPA concepts (caching, locking, transactions, querying, mapping, jpql, criteria). The User Guide is a big step towards better documentation, it removes the confusion over the old API and puts things in a JPA perspective. But it is incomplete, missing documentation on some key features. It also seems like it is no longer being maintained.
The Eclipselink project has moved to Github: https://github.com/eclipse-ee4j/eclipselink
