Usage of JAVA & Shortcomings
The application has been programmed using the ~latest~ version of JAVA. (JDK1.2 Beta3).This version of JAVA includes a wide variety of features that I have incorporated (such as tree-rendering, seamless JDBC integration, enhanced User Interfaces in the form of SWING). This is a beta release of JDK1.2 and hasn't been optimised as a release version yet (It is available only for JAVA developers). This accounts for the slow speed that the application runs with. Also, since the version hasn't been completely optimised, the garbage collection isn't upto the mark, which results in lot of memory space being used by the application. It sometimes also crashes the application due to lack of memory.
Since this is a completely new JAVA release, there isn't any reference material available apart from the documented Application Programming Interfaces (API's) that are included with the pre-release. This made programming more streneous and I had to look through a lot of examples before programming.
I have made use of JDBC classes provided with JDBC 1.0. The classes enable creating an ODBC-JDBC Bridge to connect to any ODBC compliant database. Once this bridge is created, simple SQL statements can be executed from JAVA code over the bridge. This version of JDBC allows applications to connect to a local database. Other commercial versions (costs $4500-$6000) of the ODBC-JDBC bridge are available. More of this is detailed on the Introduction.