I'm writing an application that uses JPA for persistence. Currently I'm testing with Hibernate and a MySQL database. The server it's going to be deployed on already has ZODB running though. To avoid having to install MySQL especially for this app, it would be nice to use ZODB as the backend for JPA. Is this possible, with or without Hibernate?
Do you mean ZODB as in Zope Object Database? If so the answer is no. JPA is all about ORM (Object Relational Mapping), meaning your are working with relational databases. ZODB is a object database which is completely different thing. Why would you use JPA if you are going to use a object database?