[ANN] SwingSet 0.9.0-beta

New Roads, LA - October 26, 2004 - We have just released version 0.9.0-beta
of SwingSet, an open source Java toolkit that allows the standard Java Swing
components to be made database aware. This is a major release with an
entirely new datasource abstraction layer. Our goal for the 0.9.X series is
to focus on bug squashing and possibly some minor feature enhancements. We
hope to have a 1.0 production release by the end of 2004. See
http://swingset.sourceforge.net for a detailed list of features and
additional information. A Java Web Start version of the SwingSet demo
application is available from http://swingset.sourceforge.net/SwingSet.jnlp

For version 0.9.0 all of the SwingSet components are now based on a new
SSRowSet interface rather than Sun's existing RowSet interface. The
SSRowSet differs from RowSet in two important ways:
1. SSRowSet extends serializable which greatly facilitates
serialization/deserialization in the rest of the SwingSet components
2. SSRowSet only contains methods necessary to support the data types in
used by SSTextDocument which will make writing SSRowSet implementations for
non-updatable RowSets and other non-database datasources (e.g. a HashMap)
much easier

A SSJdbcRowSetImpl implementation of SSRowSet is provided to replace the
JdbcRowSetImpl used in most existing SwingSet applications. It is basically
a serialized wrapper of JdbcRowSetImpl. It can be used in conjunction with
the new SSConnection, a serialized wrapper of the Connection interface,
which handles serialization/deserialization of database connection info
(path, username, password, etc.). Finally, an SSRowSetAdapter is provided
with empty method implementations of everything in SSRowSet. This adapter
can be easily extended with non-empty method implementations for
non-database datasources.

To accommodate non-updatable RowSets, SSJdbcRowSetImpl can be extended with
custom updateXYZ() methods to handle database updates via INSERT/UPDATE
queries. SSJdbcRowSetImpl can also serve as a template for writing SSRowSet
wrappers for other RowSets (e.g. CachedRowSet, WebRowSet, etc.).

Unfortunately, the introduction of the SSRowSet requires modification of
existing SwingSet applications, but with the SSJdbcRowSetImpl and
SSConnection, these changes should be minimal. In order to provide maximum
migration time, the 0.8.3-beta version of SwingSet was released on
10-22-2004 with all of the latest bugfixes and enhancements. Other than the
new datasource abstraction layer, 0.8.3 and 0.9.0 are identical. Below is an
example of changes required
to transition to 0.9.0 and later versions of SwingSet:

***********************
OLD - Connection/RowSet
***********************
import java.sql.*;
import com.sun.rowset.JdbcRowSetImpl;

Connection conn = null;
JdbcRowSetImpl rowset = null;

Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver");
conn = DriverManager.getConnection

("jdbcostgresql://pgserver.greatmindsworking.com/suppliers_and_parts",
"swingset","test");
rowset = new JdbcRowSetImpl(conn);

***************************
NEW - SSConnection/SSRowSet
***************************
import java.sql.*; // still needed
import com.nqadmin.swingSet.datasources.SSJdbcRowSetImpl;
import com.nqadmin.swingSet.datasources.SSConnection;

SSConnection ssConnection = null;
SSJdbcRowSetImpl rowset = null;

ssConnection = new SSConnection

("jdbcostgresql://pgserver.greatmindsworking.com/suppliers_and_parts",
"swingset", "test");
ssConnection.setDriverName("org.postgresql.Driver" );
ssConnection.createConnection();
rowset = new SSJdbcRowSetImpl(ssConnection);