JDBC demonstration courseware using Servlets and Java Server Pages

This paper describes the design and functionality of courseware developed to demonstrate the JDBC API. The courseware is used in an advanced undergraduate database course that emphasizes the use of Web access to database systems. The JDBC courseware is written using Java Servlets and Java Server Pages, allowing the user to view the metadata associated with a database, to view and browse the information in a database according to the database metadata, and to query and/or manipulate data using SQL statements. The advantage of the courseware is that it demonstrates the main functionality of the JDBC API in an application-independent manner. The courseware can access any ODBC-compliant database, emphasizing the generality of the JDBC API and helping students understand how JDBC can be used to query the metadata of the database as well as the database contents.