Datasource overview

A datasource is a component used to connect to a database. Through the datasource, an application can persist its state (generally speaking) to reuse it later on.

A datasource can connect to any database, as long as the application server provides a connector for it, which is the driver.

JBoss EAP 7 requires that all drivers must be compliant with the JDBC 4 specification. We will see this in detail in the following sections.

Prerequisites

Before we begin, we should have MySQL 5 installed on the system. In case you don't have it set up, it's time to take a dive into the operational world and install what is needed, and it's not just MySQL.

Let's now give a warm welcome to Docker, as our enabling technology to better understand the book. We have a chapter dedicated to Docker and will learn more about it in detail in Chapter 13, Using EAP 7 with Docker.

Regardless of your operating system, whether, Windows, Linux, or OS X, you should be able to install Docker in a few steps....