We have found interesting way to use Spring 3+ and JPA 2.0 together with the help of dynamic proxies. You can find it posted on http://www.lexaden.com/main/entry/spring_3_1_and_jpa We use interfaces with named JPA queries to execute them. Interfaces are treated as ordinary Spring beans with the help of dynamic proxies. They can be injected (or autowired) into any other beans the same way. Queries are located in a separate orm-mapping.xml files and split up by domain (or at your convenience). That gives a high flexibility and maintainability to persistent layer