How to connect XAMPP MySQL local DB using JDBC?

Question

I have this Tetris game written in Java, which uses DB to record high scores. It worked ok as long as I was using remote MySQL DB, but now I'm trying to set up localhost DB using XAMPP MySQL and it keeps going like "SQLException: Communications link failure" at command:

con = java.sql.DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:mysql://localhost/score", user, psw);

I guess it's either wrong URL or DB configuration, but I really don't know what to check. Any ideas?

EDIT: My friend has fixed my problem by replacing "localhost" in URL by "127.0.0.1" (which was quite embarrassing as you can surely imagine :P ).

So question is: Why is XAMPP not able to translate "localhost" into IP address and how to fix it?

Answer 1

This post claims to have fixed it. Check it out.

Answer 2

In MySql you have to allow access for your user from localhost explicitly. Here is an example (taken from here):

mysql> grant usage on *.* to amarokuser@localhost identified by 'amarokpasswd';
mysql> grant all privileges on amarokdb.* to amarokuser@localhost ;

Answer 3

Why is XAMPP not able to translate "localhost" into IP address and how to fix it?

This is not a XAMPP problem nor a programming problem. This is more a DNS problem.

To start, do you have a %SystemRoot%/system32/drivers/etc/hosts file with the following line as first line? (thus, after all comments, but before any other host declarations)

127.0.0.1 localhost

Update: as per the comments I've Googled a bit and it look like that the MySQL JDBC driver doesn't eat IPv6 addresses at all. In other words, you'll need to change ::1 to 127.0.0.1. But I also found this topic which mentions that you can use the following JVM argument to fix this problem:

java -Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true