HELP ! Making a retry counter

Question

I'm making a retry counter for the logins and I'm using the j_security_check from Tomcat.
I made a little class that must check if there is a session object.
if not create one and put the value 1 in it, for the first try.
If there is a session object, increase the value and put it in the session object.
Now is my problem that I get a nullpointer exception and I don't know how to fix it.
This is the code:
package beans;
import java.io.Serializable;
import javax.servlet.http.*;
import  javax.servlet.jsp.PageContext;
* @author Sander Stad
public class LoginCountBean implements Serializable{
     private int count;
     private String loginTries = null;
     private Integer logins;
     HttpSession session;
     HttpServletRequest request;
     PageContext pageContext;
     public LoginCountBean(){
          count = 1;
     public boolean checkSessieObject(){
          boolean retry = true;
          loginTries = (String) pageContext.findAttribute("logins");
          if(loginTries == null){
               count = 1;
               logins = new Integer(count);
               setSessieObject(logins);
          } else{
               count = Integer.parseInt((String) pageContext.findAttribute("logins"));
               if(count >= 3){
                    retry = false;
               } else{
                    count++;
                    logins = new Integer(count);
                    pageContext.setAttribute("logins", logins, PageContext.SESSION_SCOPE);
          return retry;
     public void setSessieObject(Integer logins){
          request.getSession();
          pageContext.setAttribute("logins", logins, PageContext.SESSION_SCOPE);
}

Answer 1

How does the bean get the request and pageContext objects?