11.1 Introduction

In this chapter, we take a fairly cursory look at several GUI (graphical user interface) products meant for building Java applications. All of these products provide tools of various sorts for accessing data in SQL (and other) databases, but their support for some of the technologies we've discussed in this book such as embedding SQL statements in Java code ranges from nonexistent in some products to fairly impressive in others, at least for embedded SQL in Java. (The other aspects of SQLJ invoking Java methods from SQL code and using Java classes in SQL databases aren't meaningful to a GUI application builder; they are more relevant to a database management system.)

We show enough of each product to give you a feel for its use in database applications, but the truth is that we don't have the space or time to show you every aspect of the products even the database-related aspects. Instead, we try to focus on those features that illustrate the products' relationship to the various technologies on which this book has focussed. But for those readers who haven't had an opportunity to use any of these products, we'd like to briefly describe what they do and how they're used. The rest of you can take a short break and rejoin us in a few minutes.

11.2 Why Use a GUI Application Builder for Java?

As a reader of this book, you are probably a user of Java, meaning that you probably write code in the Java programming language. Java has...