Database access - Making Java Groovy - page 269

Lessons learned (JDBC)
1 . JDBC is a very verbose, low-level set of classes for SQL access to relational data-
bases.
2 . The Spring JdbcTemplate class (covered in chapter 7 ) is a good choice if
Groovy is not available.
Years ago this was the only realistic option for Java. Now other options exist, like Spring's
JdbcTemplate (discussed in chapter 7 on Spring) and object-relational mapping tools
like Hibernate (discussed later in this chapter). Still, if you already know SQL and you
want to implement a DAO interface, Groovy provides a very easy alternative: the
groovy.sql.Sql class.
8.2. The Groovy approach, part 1: groovy.sql.Sql
The groovy.sql.Sql class is a simple façade over JDBC. The class takes care of re-
source management for you, as well as creating and configuring statements and logging er-
rors. It's so much easier to use than regular JDBC that there's never any reason to go back.
The next listing shows the part of the class that sets up the connection to the database and
initializes it.