Database access - Making Java Groovy - page 267

Listing 8.4. Adding creation and population of the Product table to the DAO
A phrase often used when describing Java is that the essence is buried in ceremony. JDBC
code is probably the worst offender in the whole API. The “essence” here is to create the
table and add a few rows. The “ceremony” is all the boilerplate surrounding it. As the list-
ing shows, try / catch blocks are needed because virtually everything in JDBC throws a
checked SQLException . In addition, because it's absolutely necessary to close the data-
base connection whether an exception is thrown or not, the connection must be closed in
a finally block. To make matters even uglier, the close method itself also throws an
SQLException , so it, too, must be wrapped in a try / catch block, and of course the
only way to avoid a potential NullPointerException is to verify that the connection
and statement references are not null when they're closed.
This boilerplate is repeated inevery method inthe DAO.Forexample, the following listing
shows the implementation of the findProductById method.