An early access binary for the new JDBC Connector is available. The JDBC Connector is a J2EE Connector Architecture compliant connector that facilitates integration of databases with J2EE application servers.

The Early Access release of the JDBC Connector is a binary download, and is available at:

http://developer.java.sun.com/developer/earlyAccess/jdbc/index.html

The download includes a set of RAR files in both the J2EE Connector Architecture 1.0 and 1.5 formats plus a step-by-step guide to how to use the JDBC Connector.

The JDBC Connector is easy to use. Simply open the Resource Adapter Archive (RAR) file that matches the transactional abilities of your driver, add the JDBC driver classes, and set a couple of configuration properties. Then save the RAR file, and you are ready to deploy it into the application server. While deploying, link the JNDI names of the JDBC resource references in your J2EE application to the DataSource objects in the JDBC Connector. From there on, you use the standard JDBC API as usual. Your J2EE applications will run with no changes at all because with the JDBC Connector J2EE Applications don't need to know or care whether the JDBC driver is packaged as a connector or not.

Can someone explain the benefits of a JCA for JDBC? Just from reading the initial post I can't determine how it helps integration between app server and JDBC.

One of the differences is that you can deploy a JCA adapter into a running container process. The connection pool is set up as you deploy it, rather than at server startup - so you don't have to restart the server.

You can also package JCA adapters as part of an EAR application, to restrict its scope.

<quote>
 One of the differences is that you can deploy a JCA adapter into a running container process. The connection pool is set up as you deploy it, rather than at server startup - so you don't have to restart the server.

You can also package JCA adapters as part of an EAR application, to restrict its scope.
</quote>

That depends on J2EE Server you use. For example, Borland Enterprise Server 5.1 supports hot deployment of JDBC data sources (with connection pools) as well as other resources (JMS, JCA). Not sure about restricting scope of resource definitions, but resource definitions can be bundled into EAR (as a Borland specific extension to EAR).

I really don't see any reason for J2EE programmer to use JDBC through JCA adapter, except that it sounds cool. JDBC Connector Component can be useful for J2EE server builders, because they can implement generic connection pooling and generic connection wrappers for transaction management so they don't need to write connection pooling and transaction management for JDBC, JMS and JCA separately. But, most of J2EE vendors have already implemented this separately, so again, I don't see any value in JDBC Connector Component, except educational, for JCA adapter builders.

Please correct me if I am wrong,
Mileta

Regards,
Mileta

The thing is that JCA introduces Connection Pooling and Hot Deployment as a standard compared to vendor specific solutions available today. One significant step to portability of J2EE apps.

The goal is that at the end, it does no longer depend on the App server you use.

... but only BES supports this.

The JCA allows
a) hot deployment
b) in a vendor independant way

Meaning: you dont have to assume anything about the appserver config, you just deploy you ear.

-Nick

There is another advantage, too. Many JCA implementations have an application view layer -- this was first done by WebLogic Integration, but others have adopted this model.

An application view is an XML layer over a JCA adapter. This XML layer is asynchronous so it converts synchronous JDBC calls into request / response XML messages. This creates a loose coupling layer on top of a tightly coupled implementation.

Basically, using JCA, it makes it much much easier to get at DBs through Web Services in a standard way.

We did an example of this at the dev2dev Days event for BEA. It was really cool to take a JDBC driver and quickly convert it to be asynch and then access it through all types of web services mechanisms.

Tyler

Doesn't JBoss do this already?

They had implemented as eary as I can think of..
JBOSS Rocks... All app servers will be gone b4 2005. JBOSS will be app server beater.

Does anyone have an idea of how to get this thing work in Jboss 3.03 ? I didn't find the way to add the connection factory as said in the doc. Thanks

I dont quite agree..

JDBC Connector seems to be a value add in many ways. Here are some points.

It can help J2EE developer to port his JDBC driver across application servers.

It can help J2EE developer to plug in a JDBC 1.0 driver to application servers.

It can help JDBC driver vendors to ship their jdbc drivers as a portable unit.

Application server vendors can use this in their product to actually plug-in third party JDBC drivers in a standard way.