Chapter 23
Swing with JTable
In this lesson you’ll learn how to work with a Swing control that is advanced and popular for enterprise applications: JTable. This UI component enables you to present data in a grid with rows and columns. After learning the basics of working with JTable, in the Try It section you’ll apply these new skills to display the portfolio data that, as of Lesson 22, is stored in the database.
In other words, you’ll build a client-server application, where the Swing-based GUI is a client and the RDBMS is a server. Such architecture was pretty popular in the mid-nineties. Rich clients were developed in Visual Basic, PowerBuilder, Delphi, Java, or C++, and they connected directly to database servers such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, Microsoft SQL Server, and Informix.
In the late nineties, thin clients (plain-looking HTML-based web pages with almost no code implementing business logic) became the trend. These days applications with rich UIs are coming back, but typically you’ll be using an application server as a middleman between the client and the data storage. I’ll describe such middlemen starting in Lesson 26, but your UI skills would be incomplete without your knowing how to program data grids.
JTable and the MVC Paradigm
The Swing class JTable is a powerful UI component created for displaying tabular data like a spreadsheet. The data is represented as rows and columns; that’s why the JTable component is often used to display data from relational databases, ...
