Since JPA and JDO specs were written for earlier JDKs then I guess they have never been updated to reflect what more recent JDBC specs mandate. Since DataNucleus (v5+) supports JRE 1.8+ ONLY then there is no issue with including JDBC4+ semantics. What other JPA providers do or not you'd have to ask them
True, but before putting in the effort I prefer to discover if the project maintainers are in favour of such a change. I also don't know if a similar problem afflicts other JPA implementations.
I have been a little surprised recently, to discover that many people remain unaware that specifying the driver class is unnecessary in JDBC 4.
Since Java 6 / JDBC 4 it has been possible (and normal practice) to open a Connection without specifying the driver or attempting to load its class. Unfortunately if I omit the driver name in DataNucleus (JPA api), it attempts to load a driver class with the name "" (i.e. an empty string), and then fails.
