Developing a platform: better to command or provide

Question

I'm developing a platform that will provide services to a set of classes (plugins) that must extend from an abstract base class. One of the services is a database connection to a common database that alot of the plugins would probably want to use, like the employee database. This is to keep the total number of connections hitting the database to a minimum.
In general would it be better for the platform, through the abstract class, require the plugin to support a setConnection(Connection empConn) method that the platform would call or pass a call back reference to the platform and let plugin ask for the common connection if they want it as in public Connection getEmpConn()Thanks,

Answer 1

If you migrate a 1.2 Swing app to a 1.1.8 platform, you will also need to download the swing package for 1.1.8, and change all the source code imports from javax.swing.* to com.sun.java.swing.*.
Otherwise your Swing code won't compile. There was a package name change for Swing between 1.1 and 1.2. The other poster gave details on how to have Collections run in 1.1
Security might be an issue - J2 upgraded the whole security thing. Only way I know around this is to delete the offending security code to run in 1.1.
Otherwise a 1.2 program should run OK in a 1.1 environment.
Cheers