How do I get path / classpath separator?

OS platform has a different symbol used for path separator. Path separator is a symbol that separate one path element from the other. In Windows the path separator is a semicolon symbol (;), you have something like:

.;something.jar;D:/libs/commons.jar

While in Linux based operating systems the path separator is a colon symbol (:), it looks like:

.:something.jar:/libs/commons.jar

To obtain the path separator you can use the following code.

package org.kodejava.lang;

import java.util.Properties;

public class PathSeparator {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // Get System properties
        Properties properties = System.getProperties();

        // Get the path separator which is unfortunately
        // using a different symbol in different OS platform.
        String pathSeparator = properties.getProperty("path.separator");
        System.out.println("pathSeparator = " + pathSeparator);
    }
}

How do I make a centered JFrame?

If you have a JFrame in your Java Swing application and want to center its position on the screen you can use the following code snippets.

The first way is to utilize java.awt.Toolkit class to get the screen size. The getScreenSize() method return a java.awt.Dimension from where we can get the width and height of the screen. Having this values in hand we can calculate the top left position of our JFrame as shown in step 2 of the code below.

package org.kodejava.swing;

import javax.swing.JFrame;
import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
import javax.swing.WindowConstants;
import java.awt.Dimension;
import java.awt.Toolkit;

public class CenteredJFrame extends JFrame {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(() -> {
            // 1. Get the size of the screen
            Dimension screenSize = Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().getScreenSize();

            CenteredJFrame frame = new CenteredJFrame();
            frame.setTitle("Centered JFrame");
            frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
            frame.setSize(500, 500);

            // 2. Calculates the position where the CenteredJFrame
            // should be paced on the screen.
            int x = (screenSize.width - frame.getWidth()) / 2;
            int y = (screenSize.height - frame.getHeight()) / 2;
            frame.setLocation(x, y);
            frame.setVisible(true);
        });
    }
}

The second way which is better and simpler is to use the setLocationRelativeTo(Component) method. According to the Java API documentation of this method: If the component is null, or the GraphicsConfiguration associated with this component is null, the window is placed in the center of the screen.

If you call the JFrame.pack() method. The method should be called before the setLocationRelativeTo() method.

So we can rewrite the code above like this:

package org.kodejava.swing;

import javax.swing.SwingUtilities;
import javax.swing.WindowConstants;

public class CenteredJFrameSecond {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        SwingUtilities.invokeLater(() -> {
            CenteredJFrame frame = new CenteredJFrame();
            frame.setTitle("Centered JFrame");
            frame.setDefaultCloseOperation(WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
            frame.setSize(500, 500);

            // Place the window in the center of the screen.
            frame.setLocationRelativeTo(null);
            frame.setVisible(true);
        });
    }
}

How do I get environment variables?

Environment variables are a set of dynamic values that can affect a running process, such as our Java program. Each process usually have their own copy of these variables.

Now we would like to obtain the available variables in our environment or operating system, how do I do this in Java? Here is a code example of it.

package org.kodejava.lang;

import java.util.Map;
import java.util.Set;

public class SystemEnv {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // We get the environment information from the System class. 
        // The getenv method (why shouldn't it called getEnv()?) 
        // returns a map that will never have null keys or values 
        // returned.
        Map<String, String> map = System.getenv();

        Set<String> keys = map.keySet();
        for (String key : keys) {
            // Here we iterate based on the keys inside the map, and
            // with the key in hand we can get it values.
            String value = map.get(key);
            System.out.println(key + " = " + value);
        }
    }
}

Here are some results on my machine.

...
M2 = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\maven\apache-maven-3.5.0\bin
JETTY_HOME = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\jetty\tools\jetty-distribution-9.4.31.v20200723
USERNAME = wsaryada
ProgramFiles(x86) = C:\Program Files (x86)
M2_REPO = C:\Users\wsaryada\.m2
SPRING_HOME = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\spring-boot-cli\spring-2.2.4.RELEASE
M2_HOME = C:\ProgramData\chocolatey\lib\maven\apache-maven-3.5.0
JAVA_HOME = C:\Program Files\Java\jdk1.8.0_161
OS = Windows_NT
COMPUTERNAME = KRAKATAU
CATALINA_HOME = C:\tools\apache-tomcat-10.0.11
...

How do I insert a record into database table?

In this example you’ll learn how to create a program to insert data into a database table. To insert a data we need to get connected to a database. After a connection is obtained you can create a java.sql.Statement object from it, and using this object we can execute some query strings.

package org.kodejava.jdbc;

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.SQLException;
import java.sql.Statement;

public class InsertStatementExample {
    private static final String URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/kodejava";
    private static final String USERNAME = "kodejava";
    private static final String PASSWORD = "s3cr*t";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (Connection connection =
                     DriverManager.getConnection(URL, USERNAME, PASSWORD)) {

            // Create a statement object.
            Statement stmt = connection.createStatement();
            String sql = "INSERT INTO book (isbn, title, published_year) " +
                    "VALUES ('978-1617293566', 'Modern Java in Action', 2019)";

            // Call execute() method of the statement object and pass the
            // query.
            stmt.execute(sql);
        } catch (SQLException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Below is the script from creating the book table.

CREATE TABLE `book`
(
    `id`             bigint(20) unsigned                  NOT NULL AUTO_INCREMENT,
    `isbn`           varchar(50) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci  NOT NULL,
    `title`          varchar(100) COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL,
    `published_year` int(11)                                       DEFAULT NULL,
    `price`          decimal(10, 2)                       NOT NULL DEFAULT '0.00',
    PRIMARY KEY (`id`)
) ENGINE = InnoDB
  DEFAULT CHARSET = utf8
  COLLATE = utf8_unicode_ci;

Maven Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-j</artifactId>
    <version>8.4.0</version>
</dependency>

Maven Central

How do I create a connection to database?

This post is about an example for obtaining a connection to MySQL database. For connecting to other database all you have to do is change the url to match to url format for a particular database and of course you have to register a correct JDBC driver of the database you are using.

Here are the steps:

  • Define the JDBC url of your database. Below is the format of JDBC url for MySQL database. localhost is your database address and kodejava is the database name.
private static final String URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/kodejava";
  • Define the username and password for the connection.
private static final String USERNAME = "kodejava";
private static final String PASSWORD = "s3cr*t";
  • Register the database JDBC driver to be used by our program. Below is the driver for MySQL database.
Class.forName("com.mysql.cj.jdbc.Driver");

The driver registration step above is not required anymore for modern JDBC drivers (JDBC 4.0 / since JDK 6). The JDBC driver class will be located using the service provider mechanism. So you can remove the Class.forName() statement above and all you need to do is place the JDBC driver in your classpath, and the driver will be loaded automatically.

  • We can open a connection to the database.
Connection connection = DriverManager.getConnection(URL, USERNAME, PASSWORD);
  • Do any database operation such as select, insert, update and delete.
  • Finally don’t forget to close the Connection object. We usually do this in the finally block of the try-catch block`
if (connection != null) {
    connection.close();
}

But in the code snippet below instead of manually close the connection object we use the try-with-resource statement, this statement will automatically close the connection for us.

Here is the complete code snippet.

package org.kodejava.jdbc;

import java.sql.Connection;
import java.sql.DriverManager;
import java.sql.PreparedStatement;
import java.sql.ResultSet;

public class ConnectionSample {
    private static final String URL = "jdbc:mysql://localhost/kodejava";
    private static final String USERNAME = "kodejava";
    private static final String PASSWORD = "s3cr*t";

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try (Connection connection =
                     DriverManager.getConnection(URL, USERNAME, PASSWORD)) {
            System.out.println("connection = " + connection);

            String sql = "SELECT isbn, title, published_year FROM book";
            PreparedStatement stmt = connection.prepareStatement(sql);

            ResultSet rs = stmt.executeQuery();
            while (rs.next()) {
                System.out.println(rs.getString("isbn") + ", " +
                        rs.getString("title") + ", " +
                        rs.getInt("published_year"));
            }
        } catch (Exception e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        }
    }
}

Maven Dependencies

<dependency>
    <groupId>com.mysql</groupId>
    <artifactId>mysql-connector-j</artifactId>
    <version>8.4.0</version>
</dependency>

Maven Central