It's an ugly thing. They really need a way to programmatically zap the entity cache.
Even if it's not used in production, it would help with development.
And the other dark side is you REALLY want TopLink to cache, it's not very happy without one (and it flies with one), so that makes it even more important.
I don't know if Hibernate has better cache management options or not, you might look at that as a JPA implementation alternative if the TopLink options don't work out for you.
[Message sent by forum member 'whartung' (whartung)]
http://forums.java.net/jive/thread.jspa?messageID=257064