Struts and Connection Pooling

[Marcellus Tryk]

I've frequently seen it stated that Struts provide database connection pooling. 'Mastering Jakarta Struts' says "As of 1.1, the DataSource implementation used by the Struts project models the Pooled implementation". However in all the examples I see (including in MJS) the connection is retrieved via the DataSource, used and then explicitly closed. It seems to me that if there's a pooling mechanism the connection should be freed (returned to the pool) and not closed. I think I must really be missing something and I haven't been able to find any good information on this topic.
Thanks,
Mars

[Marcellus Tryk]

Oops - I didn't read far enough. 'Mastering Jakarta Struts' goes on to say:
In the normal definition of the Connection class, this method would close the connection to the database and thus render it useless for later processes, but because this Connection object is an instance of a wrapper object, the Connection is returned to the pool for later use, instead of actually being closed.
That certainly answers my question.
Thanks Mr. Goodwill!

[Axel Janssen]

Hi Mars,
in my opinion one of my most efective refactorings of last week was to replace the connection pool of struts-config.xml with a own connection pooling management class separated from struts. I use http://www.bitmechanic.com/projects/jdbcpool/ (there might exist better ones. one could even use some object relational mapping tool).
It really helped to keep db access layer separated from struts. So I can put business logic in beans or other Java classes, let them access the database, test the business logic and then later build some struts-jsp/servlet stuff which accesses this business logic.
This leads to faster testing, better separation of logical layers, easier debugging if needed and maybe something I am still not aware of.
Any opinions?
..answering not asked questions
[ October 20, 2002: Message edited by: Axel Janssen ]

[Adam Hardy]

Yes I agree totally. Struts offers several features to accelerate development for simple projects, such as connection pooling, but IMO they can and should be dropped and replaced by more elegant and robust solutions for big projects.
Adam

[Marcellus Tryk]

Thanks for the insights - I'm going to pursue that.
Mars