Object scope?

Question

Am I wrong in thinking that all objects are always references? I'm trying to create a database connection and statement object within a method, and have a second method that does some initialization to the object. What I'm doing looks something like this:
private int dbConn(Connection a_con, Properties a_prop, Statement a_stmt){
  try{
    a_con = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:myDB", a_prop);
  }catch (SQLException sqle) {
    System.err.println("\nFailed to connect to the database: " + sqle.getMessage());
    sqle.printStackTrace();
    return -1;
  try{
    a_stmt = a_con.createStatement();
  }catch (SQLException sqle) {
    System.err.println("\nFailed to create the statement object: " + sqle.getMessage());
    sqle.printStackTrace();
    try{
      a_con.close();
    }catch (SQLException sqle2) {
      System.err.println("\nFailed to close the connection to the database " +
                         "(after failing to create a statement object): " +
                         sqle2.getMessage());     
    return -1;
  return 0;
public int getData(){
  Connection conn = null;
  Statement stmt = null;
  int jk;
  jk = dbConn(conn, i_prop, stmt);
  // i_prop is a Property object that is local to the class the method is in
  // At this point the conn is always null for me
}

Answer 1

Put the connection, properties and statement in one class:class DBConnInfo
  Connection conn;
  Properties prop;
  Statement  stmt;
}then you can pass the DBConnInfo object to your method:private int dbConn(DBConnInfo connInfo)
  try
    connInfo.conn = DriverManager.getConnection("jdbc:odbc:myDB", connInfo.prop);
  catch (SQLException sqle)
    System.err.println("\nFailed to connect to the database: " + sqle.getMessage());
    sqle.printStackTrace();
    return -1;
  try
    connInfo.stmt = connInfo.conn.createStatement();
  catch (SQLException sqle)
    System.err.println("\nFailed to create the statement object: " + sqle.getMessage());
    sqle.printStackTrace();
    try
      connInfo.conn.close();
    catch (SQLException sqle2)
      System.err.println("\nFailed to close the connection to the database " +
                         "(after failing to create a statement object): " +
                          sqle2.getMessage());
    return -1;
  return 0;
}That way, the conn and stmt member variables stay set when you return.
Just as an aside, I would recommend that instead of catching the SQL exceptions and returning a lot of arbitrary codes, simply declare the method as throwing SQL exceptions and after catching them in the method re-throw them back to the caller. That way the caller can decide what to do with them.