Various embodiments of a system and method for persisting application state data are disclosed. The system may include a server cluster networked to a persistent data store such as a database resident on a backend system. Each server of the cluster may include a server container providing services for one or more applications along with a persistence mechanism. The persistence mechanism may be able to detect changes to the state of an application and persist only the portion of the application state that changed to the remote, persistent data store. In some embodiments, the persistence mechanism may be a Java Data Object (JDO) persistence manager which provides object persistence and transaction support while masking the peculiarities of resource managers for particular databases.