How do I expand my simple JSP page to implement Connection Pooling?

Question

Hi everyone,
I have a small SQL database which contains information about Students and a StudenBean which contains their attributes and appropriate get/set methods (which I haven't needed to use yet).
I want to write a simple JSP page which displays all the students details in one big table. I can do this using the basic prototyping method of adding the dataSource and driver details to the deployment descriptor (web.xml - I'm using the latest version of Tomcat by the way) and then accessing the database using JSP standard SQL actions.
Here's a snipet of what I've done (just an example, the final code works):
<sql:query var="temp"
sql="SELECT * FROM Employee ORDER BY UserName"
/>
<c:forEach items="${temp.rows}" var="row">
<td><c:out value ="${row.UserName}"/></td>
<td><c:out value ="${row.FirstName}"/></td>
<td><c:out value ="${row.LastName}"/></td>
Now I want to upgrade! I want to access the dataSource using Connection Pooling and it's causing me a lot of trouble. I already have the required working classes/data such as ConnectionPool.java, ResourceManagerListener.java, the MySQL driver etc.
However, I don't know what the best way to setup the connection for my purposes would be and where I should do it.
Do I need to write a servlet or tag handler/custom action to establish the connection and access my bean through it? I would like to keep a similar sort of business logic as I already have developed i.e. be able to use actions in my JSP page to cycle through the database and print out each detail from the row.
Rather confused and muddled. Thanks for any input!

Answer 1

Good idea.
Set up a JNDI data source for your app, according to these docs:
http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/tomcat-4.1-doc/jndi-datasource-examples-howto.html
You'll have to put the right information into your web.xml and a context.xml. Once you've done that, your JSTL JSPs will simply use the connection resource automagically.
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