The JSR 220 specification defines Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0. One of its primary goals is to simplify the creation, management, and storage of entity beans. Working towards that goal, Sun Microsystems and supporting community developers created a new application programming interface (API) that lets you use "plain old Java objects" or POJOs as your persistable entities. The Java Persistence API facilitates your use of POJOs as entity beans and significantly reduces the need for complicated deployment descriptors and extra helper beans. Additionally, you can even use the API in desktop applications.