Our project is now OpenJPA ready and connects with our MySQL database. I currently have it running locally on a Tomcat server (8.0).
I've configured a ton of files (too many to go over). We will soon add a lot of these files to our .gitignore file so that we don't have to deal with small tweaks to the files that are unique to our systems.
I added a FactoryStartup class that initializes an EntityManagerFactory and EntityManager for us (the EntityManager is what is used to make all query calls). This still needs changed a little bit.
REST functionality is in place but I still need to make the classes for it but I need a break now.

There are a lot of steps to get it to work correctly so let me know if/when you have trouble!