Question

When I am writing connection pool to connect to database, I am always confused about the difference of using a Driver-based connection or a DataSource-based connection. It seems both of them can get the things done, but I am not sure of their difference. Can anyone tell me about it, or give me some kind of links?

Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

DataSource and Driver are not comparable – DataSource and DriverManager are.

Driver is the basic construct of JDBC, and isn’t going anywhere. The JDBC driver implementation provides this.

DriverManager is old, inflexible and unofficially deprecated:

The DataSource interface, new in the JDBC 2.0 API, provides another way to connect to a data source. The use of a DataSource object is the preferred means of connecting to a data source.

So your primary interface to interact with for your pool is DataSource, not DriverManager. The Driver class will still be used, however.

Incidentally, why are you writing your own connection pool? There are (at least) two high quality open-source implementations out there already (DBCP and C3P0).