That's actually brilliant, except I have no working knowledge of how to connect my GUI input to the database. I've googled around, but I'm still relatively clueless. Would you provide a good link for what I'm trying to do, or maybe a simple example of where to start?

I'm a relative newbie to Java, but I'm working on a project. I want to take the input from a Java GUI and store it in a text file. I also want to be able to take that same file and read it back to the GUI. The idea here is to, say, store a customer's purchases in a single file, and allow the user to view a particular customer's purchases. Let's say the input looks like this:

John 3-18-2012 Hammer
Bill 3-14-2012 Nail
...