Help needed understanding this connection

Question

I am trying to follow some previous written code to understand JDBC better. When i have previously connected to a database, i have created a connection and then called it up when needed. In this code i have found though, they seem to use somthing called a datasource?
public static Connection getXADBConnection() { Connection conn = null; DataSource ds = null; try { Object obj = lookup(MovieConstants.MOVIE_XA_DATASOURCE_NAME); ds = (DataSource) narrow(obj, DataSource.class); conn = ds.getConnection(); } catch (SQLException ex) { throw new DAORuntimeException(ex); } return conn; }
So is datasource a connection already provided?? If so, is it better to use a datasource or to register through a driver manager? Also, if its not too much to ask, i am struggling to understand the first two lines in the try loop, what exactly is this doing?
cheers

Answer 1

nick2price wrote:
...try loop...Unless that was a typo, I think you should put off learning JDBC for a while and start with the basics.
Start here:
[http://java.sun.com/docs/books/tutorial/]