The recommended way to connect to postgres is via the jdbc client. Remember that you need to put the jdbc jar into your CLASS_PATH.

Good information about the connection string (connection URL), and information about how to initializing the driver can be found here.

//paste this into a file called Postgres.java
import java.sql.*;

public class Postgres {

    public static void main(String[] args) {
        try {
            Class.forName("org.postgresql.Driver");
        }
        catch (java.lang.ClassNotFoundException e) {
            System.out.println(e.getMessage());
        }

        String url = "jdbc:postgresql://host:port/database";
        String username = "database";
        String password = "password";

        try {
            Connection db = DriverManager.getConnection(url, username, password);
            Statement st = db.createStatement();
            ResultSet rs = st.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM people");
            while (rs.next()) {
                System.out.print("Column 1 returned ");
                System.out.println(rs.getString(2));
                System.out.print("Column 2 returned ");
                System.out.println(rs.getString(3));
            }
            rs.close();
            st.close();
            }
        catch (java.sql.SQLException e) {
            System.out.println(e.getMessage());
        }
    }

}

Java Spring

If you are using Spring, add org.postgresql and org.springframework spring-jdbc as dependencies.

<dependency>
  <groupId>org.postgresql</groupId>
  <artifactId>postgresql</artifactId>
  <version>9.4-1201-jdbc4</version>
</dependency>
<dependency>
  <groupId>org.springframework</groupId>
  <artifactId>spring-jdbc</artifactId>
  <version>4.0.0.RELEASE</version>
</dependency>

This example will use a context.txt file including connection information. Add this bean to beans in your created context.txt.

<bean id="dataSource" class="org.springframework.jdbc.datasource.DriverManagerDataSource">
  <property name="driverClassName" value="org.postgresql.Driver"/>
  <property name="url" value="jdbc:postgresql://hostname:5432/username"/>
  <property name="username" value="username"/>
  <property name="password" value="password"/>
</bean>

The DataSource uses the information from the context file to connect to ElephantSQL. The code in this example will create a table called elephant and insert some example data. It will then ask for the data with id = 2 and print it to the console.

import javax.sql.DataSource;

import org.springframework.context.ApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.context.support.ClassPathXmlApplicationContext;
import org.springframework.jdbc.core.JdbcTemplate;

public class SimpleElephantSQLExample
{
  public static void main(String []args)
  {
    ApplicationContext applicationContext = new ClassPathXmlApplicationContext("context.xml");
    DataSource ds = (DataSource)applicationContext.getBean("dataSource");
    JdbcTemplate jt = new JdbcTemplate(ds);

    jt.execute("create table elephant (id int, name varchar)");
    jt.execute("insert into elephant (id, name) values (1, 'elephant_1')");
    jt.execute("insert into elephant (id, name) values (2, 'elephant_2')");

    Object[] parameters = new Object[] {new Integer(2)};
    Object o = jt.queryForObject("select name from elephant where id = ?",
      parameters, String.class);
    System.out.println((String)o);
  }
}