2.1 Introduction

As an SQL programmer, you are certainly familiar with one or more programming languages, possibly COBOL, C, or C++. You might have embedded SQL statements in one of these languages, or perhaps you have developed an application using the ODBC programming API, with the ODBC calls coming from one of these languages. This chapter is intended for those of you who have not yet encountered the Java programming language.

In any of these programming languages, or in any of the variants of SQL's stored procedure language, you have become familiar with constructs such as data types, functions, procedures, control flow, and exception handling. The Java programming language has its own particular flavor of all of these, as we shall soon see.

Many books are available to teach you the Java programming language in all of its glory. The best known of these is probably The Java Programming Language, ^[1] co-authored by James Gosling, the creator of the Java programming language. You may also want to look at the Sun Web site, java.sun.com. It contains a great deal of information on all aspects of Java.

Our goal in this chapter is to make you familiar with Java's most important elements, especially those that will be relevant to SQLJ. We will discuss JDBC, Java's method of making requests of an SQL database, separately. The JDBC 1.0 API will be discussed in Chapter 4, and the JDBC 2.0 API will be discussed in Chapter 9.