To specify the order of elements in a collection, use the @OrderBy annotation.

If the ordering element is not specified, the JPA specification says that the ordering by the primary key of the associated entity is assumed. Because JPA Objects requires the use of surrogate Ids (see Section 2.3, “Specify a primary key using @Id (not using @IdClass or @EmbeddedId)”), this basically means in insert order. For larger collections, if you want to see the most recently added objects at the top, then use @OrderBy.