I am currently trying to wrap my head around working with JPA. I can't help but feel like I am missing something or doing it the wrong way. It just seems forced so far.

What I think I know so far is that their are couple of ways to work with JPA and tools to support this.

• You can do everything in Java using annotations, and let JPA (whatever implementation you decide to use) create your schema and update it when changes are made.
• You can use a tool to reverse engineer you database and generate the entity classes for you. When the schema is updated you have to regenerate these classes, or manually update them.

There seems to be drawbacks to both, and benefits to both (as with all things). My question is in an ideal situation what is the standard workflow with JPA? Most schemas will require updates during the maintenance phase and especially during the development phase, so how is this handled?