Question

I wanted to use an Object Pool of Apache for getting Connections with each invocation of a servlet. No other servlets use this pool. I created an ObjectPool in init(). And in my doPost() I get connection from the pool, use it and release it.

This servlet is not invoked by users but periodically by a few other machines,ie, no user specific operations.

Do I need to make the pool as static or should I use ServletContext, Listeners,etc.

Answer 1

Servlets are always singletons, so if you are not using some higher level framework on top of that servlet, instance variable initialized in init() and destroyed in destroy() (it is a good practice to close the pool closing all underlying connections) is perfectly fine.

Also all connection pools are designed to work in multi-threaded environment hence you don’t need any extra synchronization.