The Tools That You Need to Get Started

Even developing the simplest JDBC programs requires a number of tools. Although it isn’t the purpose of this book to recommend and provide information about products that are commercially available, I list a few of them that may be mandatory or just useful to program with JDBC.

Most of the examples provided in this book are quite simple and run in fairly limited environments. However, as big castles are made out of little stones, large applications will often be made of very lightweight components that can also be developed and tested in limited environments. Assembling the set of components may cause the whole to require large investments in tools, but again, they aren’t required at all for the purpose of learning JDBC 3.0 using this book.

The most essential tools are as follows:

A programming editor (vi, XEmacs, or such) or IDE (Forte For Java, Kawa, JBuilder, or so mething similar).

Note

An IDE isn’t essential but eases development, compilation, and run tests for developers who aren’t familiar with operating system–level commands (that is, shells) or who don’t have access to a shell (MacOS, for example).

JDK version 1.4 with JDBC 3.0.
JDBC 3.0–compliant drivers for the database that you intend to use. There are no JDBC 3.0 drivers at the time of this writing, but these will undoubtedly be made available by the database vendors themselves. Refer to their Web sites for more information about their intention to support JDBC 3.0.
A database engine, such as MiniSQL, mSQL, Oracle, Sybase, DB2, SQL Server, Microsoft Access.
It might be useful to have access to administration tools and DBA manuals to import/export data (for example, to create database users and roles) because those tasks won’t be performed with JDBC.

Other tools that developers may use to develop applications go beyond simple standalone programs. Here are a few examples of such tools:

Small footprint databases for Palm handhelds and for JavaCard.
Lightweight object databases written in Java enabling complex object graphs to be made persistent and retrieved in a very simple way.
Object-relational bridges that enable the viewing of relational databases as object databases and the use of the Object Query Language (OQL) defined by the Object Database Management Group (ODMG, www.odmg.org).
Transaction-processing monitors written in Java, which allow large Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) applications to use a single database without the help of J2EE and its transaction management facilities.
J2EE application servers, to start writing distributed applications in a standard fashion.