I'm using Spring Boot JPA Data with Hibernate under the hood. From quick testing it seems that using public fields instead of traditional getter/setter ceremony works fine. I was able to retrieve data, change field value and it was properly persisted back.
I expect slight performance degradation, because hibernate will be forced to compare all attributes at the end of transaction instead of some kind of dirty flag set in setters (although I'm not sure if it works like that).
Also I expect that lazy field values will not work (they need getter), though lazy collections should work.
According to Hibernate documentation:
The JPA specification requires this, otherwise, the model would prevent accessing the entity persistent state fields directly from outside the entity itself.
Although Hibernate does not require it, it is recommended to follow the JavaBean conventions and define getters and setters for entity persistent attributes. Nevertheless, you can still tell Hibernate to directly access the entity fields.
So it's not really clear to me which features depend on getters/setters presence.
