Question

Since I’ve started using NetBeans, I’ve learned of some powerful ways to abstract away the process of creating Java database applications with automatically generated UI, beans bindings, and a bunch of other stuff I only vaguely understand the workings of at the moment (I hate being a newb). Problem is, how do I do the basic stuff I actually want to do? The tutorials I’ve read make a big deal about being able to connect to and mess around with a database from within the IDE, or how to create and bind some UI sliders and checkboxes to table columns, etc. But where can I learn about how to make my own code do that stuff? Abstraction is nice and all, but it’s quite useless to me at the moment for what I need done.

Can anyone refer me to some good resources or tutorials to learn this? The few I’ve found aren’t proving as useful as I’d hoped to get my project underway…

Answer 1

The JDBC Tutorial is a good starting point

A snippet from the intro

 The JDBC API is a Java API that can access any kind of tabular data,  especially data stored in a Relational Database.  JDBC helps you to write java applications that manage these three programming  activities:     1. Connect to a data source, like a database    2. Send queries and update statements to the database    3. Retrieve and process the results received from the database in answer to        your query        The following simple code fragment gives a simple example of these three steps: 

  Connection con = DriverManager.getConnection              ( 'jdbc:myDriver:wombat', 'myLogin','myPassword');    Statement stmt = con.createStatement();   ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery('SELECT a, b, c FROM Table1');   while (rs.next()) {     int x = rs.getInt('a');     String s = rs.getString('b');     float f = rs.getFloat('c');   } 

       This short code fragment instantiates a DriverManager object to  connect to a database driver and log into the database, instantiates a  Statement object that carries your SQL language query to the database;  instantiates a ResultSet object that retrieves the results of your query,  and executes a simple while loop, which retrieves and displays those  results. It's that simple.  

There is also a book preview on Google Books here.