Rowset and ResultSet differences

http://www.geekinterview.com/question_details/591

A RowSet is a disconnected, serializable version of a JDBC ResultSet.  
The RowSet is different than other JDBC interfaces in that you can write a RowSet to be vendor neutral. A third party could write a RowSet implementation that could be used with any JDBC-compliant database. The standard implementation supplied by Sun uses a ResultSet to read the rows from a database and then stores those rows as Row objects in a Vector inside the RowSet. In fact, a RowSet implementation could be written to get its data from any source. The only requirement is that the RowSet acts as if it was a ResultSet. Of course, there is no reason that a vendor couldn't write a RowSet implementation that is vendor specific.  
 
The standard implementations have been designed to provide a fairly good range of functionality. The implementations provided are:  
CachedRowSetImpl - This is the implementation of the RowSet that is closest to the definition of RowSet functionality that we discussed earlier. There are two ways to load this RowSet. The execute( ) method will load the RowSet using a Connection object. The populate( ) method will load the RowSet from a previously loaded ResultSet.  
WebRowSetImpl - This is very similar to the CachedRowSetImpl (it is a child class) but it also includes methods for converting the rows into an XML document and loading the RowSet with an XML document. The XML document can come from any Stream or Reader/Writer object. This could be especially useful for Web Services.  
JdbcRowSetImpl - This is a different style of implementation that is probably less useful in normal circumstances. The purpose of this RowSet is to make a ResultSet look like a JavaBean. It is not serializable and it must maintain a connection to the database.  
The remaining two implementations are used with the first three implementations:  
FilteredRowSetImpl - This is used to filter data from an existing RowSet. The filter will skip records that don't match the criteria specified in the filter when a next() is used on the RowSet.  
JoinRowSetImpl - This is used to simulate a SQL join command between two or more RowSet objects.