Using MySQL Stored Programs with Java

PHP is undoubtedly the most popular language used in combination with MySQL to build commercial applications andin particularweb applications. However, for applications that aspire to possibly greater scalability and standards compliance, Java offers an attractive alternative. The Java JDBC database-independent API provides robust and mature methods for performing all types of database interaction from within the Java environment and includes very strong support for handling stored programs. The J2EE standard provides a way for Java to be used within commercial and open source web or application servers to construct scalable and efficient web applications that can take advantage of MySQL as a database server, and MySQL stored programs as the interface to the database. There are also alternative Java frameworks such as Hibernate and Spring, which can expedite database access without adding all the overhead and complexity of a J2EE solution, and these can leverage stored programs as well.

In this chapter we will commence with a quick review of how you can use Java JDBC to perform interactions with the database not involving stored programs, including the basic prerequisite functions of installing and registering the JDBC driver and obtaining a connection to a MySQL server. We will also explain how to execute basic SQL from the driver and how to handle database errors.

Next, we'll proceed to examine the JDBC syntax for invoking stored programs, including handling input and output parameters and processing multiple result sets.

Finally, we'll look at how stored programs can be utilized within some of the popular Java frameworks, including servlets or Enterprise JavaBeans (EJB) within an application server, from Hibernate, or within the Spring framework.