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

How do I create a beep sound?

package org.kodejava.awt;

import java.awt.*;

public class BeepExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        // This is the way we can send a beep audio out.
        Toolkit.getDefaultToolkit().beep();
    }
}

Using Runtime.exec() method we can do something like the code snippet below to produce beep sound using powershell command.

try {
    Process process = Runtime.getRuntime().exec(
            new String[]{"powershell", "[console]::beep()"});

    int errorCode = process.waitFor();
    int exitValue = process.exitValue();
    System.out.println("errorCode = " + errorCode);
    System.out.println("exitValue = " + exitValue);
} catch (Exception e) {
    throw new RuntimeException(e);
}

We can also execute external command using ProcessBuilder class like the following code snippet:

try {
    ProcessBuilder processBuilder = new ProcessBuilder();
    processBuilder.command("powershell", "[console]::beep()");
    Process process = processBuilder.start();

    int errorCode = process.waitFor();
    int exitValue = process.exitValue();
    System.out.println("errorCode = " + errorCode);
    System.out.println("exitValue = " + exitValue);
} catch (Exception e) {
    throw new RuntimeException(e);
}

How do I sort an array of objects?

In this example we are going to learn how to sort an array of objects. We start by using an array of String objects as can be seen in the code snippet below. We sort the contents of the array using Arrays.sort() method and print the sorted result. It was really simple.

String names[] = {"Bob", "Mallory", "Alice", "Carol"};
Arrays.sort(names);
System.out.println("Names = " + Arrays.toString(names));

Next, we will sort an array of our own object. It is a bit different compared to sorting an array of primitives. The first rule is we need our object to implements the Comparable interface. This interface have one contract we need to implement, the compareTo() contract.

The basic rule of the compareTo() method is to return 0 when objects value are equals, 1 if this object value is greater and -1 if this object value is smaller. In the Person class below we simply call the String object compareTo() method. See the Person class below for more details.

package org.kodejava.util.support;

public class Person implements Comparable<Person> {
    private String name;

    public Person(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public int compareTo(Person person) {
        return this.name.compareTo(person.name);
    }

    public String toString() {
        return name;
    }
}

In the snippet below we create four Person objects. We sort the Person object based on their name using the Arrays.sort() method and print out the array values.

Person persons[] = new Person[4];
persons[0] = new Person("Bob");
persons[1] = new Person("Mallory");
persons[2] = new Person("Alice");
persons[3] = new Person("Carol");
Arrays.sort(persons);
System.out.println("Persons = " + Arrays.toString(persons));

This is the main class where you can run all the snippet above:

package org.kodejava.util;

import org.kodejava.util.support.Person;

import java.util.Arrays;

public class ObjectSortExample {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        String[] names = {"Bob", "Mallory", "Alice", "Carol"};
        Arrays.sort(names);
        System.out.println("Names = " + Arrays.toString(names));

        Person[] persons = new Person[4];
        persons[0] = new Person("Bob");
        persons[1] = new Person("Mallory");
        persons[2] = new Person("Alice");
        persons[3] = new Person("Carol");
        Arrays.sort(persons);
        System.out.println("Persons = " + Arrays.toString(persons));
    }
}

This snippet will print the following output:

Names = [Alice, Bob, Carol, Mallory]
Persons = [Alice, Bob, Carol, Mallory]