Bell Eapen MD, PhD.

Bringing Digital health & Gen AI research to life!

Deploying Java applications with embedded derby database

Ruby on Rails
Ruby on Rails (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I have been trying to brush up my programming skills during the christmas break. I recently added the tagline “Dermatologist who codes” to my elevator speech. My plan is to sharpen my java skills and to learn python and ruby on rails. I believe coding real world applications is the best way to learn/sharpen any programming language.

Here is the first innovative application, Dermatology Image Tagger that I made. I believe this would be quite useful to dermatologists for organizing clinical images. Afterwards I made a simple java database application for a colleague. I never explored the deployment of java applications before. I hit google to find useful resources, but found only very few. The one I found most useful was Aparna’s blog. Here she succinctly explains how to use the Java embedded derby database. The only thing I had to figure out the hard way was to use the connection string as below to force creation of the database in the working directory. I also added a ‘create table’ button for initial deployment.

 String host = “jdbc:derby:imfdb;create=true”;
            String uName = “your_username”;
            String uPass= “your_password”;
            con = DriverManager.getConnection(host, uName, uPass);
            stmt = con.createStatement();

She has also written an very useful article on deploying java desktop applications. I followed her instructions to package all required files into a single executable jar file for Mac and an exe file for windows. I have used this for DIT. Thanks Aparna for making life easy for me!

Pink in honor of breast cancer awareness programs
Pink in honor of breast cancer awareness programs (Photo credit: beapen)

I am still exploring python and Ruby on Rails. So far I have been really impressed by the way Ruby on Rails managed to make web application development intuitive. I also learnt git for version tracking and joined github. I have added few learning projects for python and RoR that may be useful applications if developed properly. Feel free to fork, watch or star them and if you are on github too, a follow will not hurt.

So this will be my last post for 2013. Will meet you all again in 2014.