Developing integrated Web and database applications using JAVA applets and JDBC drivers

Abstract

With the maturity of network technology, the deterministic factor of a 'successful' web site does not as much depend on its connectivity to the Internet, rather the content of web pages plays a more important role. The inclusion of dynamic data, for example, has become an increasingly desirable feature of a web page. Web servers that support dynamic web pages are capable of retrieving data at the time of user requests. Rather than being statically included in the web page, these dynamically retrieved data may physically reside in various file systems or database servers across the Internet.JAVA, a new object-oriented programming language, has become a buzzword since its introduction by Sun Microsystems in 1994 [1, 2, 3]. It was claimed that JAVA, via its ability to embed applets in a web page, would make the content of a web page alive and dynamic. Data and information on a web page can now be updated dynamically when users request them.In this paper, we discuss our experience of developing JAVA applets that use various types of JDBC (JAVA Database Connectivity) drivers to connect to and then manipulate data stored in SQL (Structured Query Language) database servers. We first start with the discussion of general client/server model involving JDBC, and then introducing the procedure of setting up programming projects employing this approach in an undergraduate database course.