Ivor Horton's Beginning Java™ 2, JDK™ 5th Edition

24.6. Creating an Interactive SQL Tool

So far the examples with database operations have all been console applications. In practice you will want to implement your database programs as interactive windowed applications, so let's apply what you know to creating an example. You will build an interactive SQL tool that will execute SQL statements to retrieve a resultset.

The interactive SQL tool will be a simple front end to the JDBC API. It will provide a means of entering and executing SQL statements, and have a display area for viewing results. This tool will be pretty basic in terms of functionality, but may come in handy for experimenting with SQL statements. You can always add extensions to this utility as you become more familiar with JDBC.

You'll set the requirements for the InteractiveSQL tool class to be fairly simple:

• Enable the user to enter and execute an SQL command

• Display the resultset from an SQL query

• Display error information where appropriate

You will implement this as an application with a window based on the Swing class JFrame. You will also use a Swing component that is particularly useful for database applications—a table defined by the JTable class. The JTable class is defined in the javax.swing.table package along with some other classes and interfaces that support tables of data. The resultset that is generated when you execute an SQL SELECT statement is a rectangular table of data values, so a JTable component is ideal for displaying resultsets. Let's first ...