Server-side connection pooling for clients in different VM's

Question

We have a need to centeralize our connection pool manger.
Is there a server-side connection pooling manger product to allow multiple clients running in different VM's to connect to and share connection objects to the same Database?
e.g. An applet, and a swing and a servlet/web app application all running in different VM's will connect to this central connection pool manager and share connection objects to the same DB.
We are using connection pooling for all of our applications but each application is maintaining its own connection pool and it is becomming a nightmare to manage and configure each one.
Also, we have to have at a miniumum one connection open per application to access the database regardless of wether we are using connection pool or not. This means that 100 apps(running in different VM's) will use at minimum 100 connections... where all of these 100 apps will do just fine with just 10-15 connections.
while back we used T3 server but can't find this product on BEA web site any more.
does jdbc 2.2 or 3.0 have any server side pool management specs outlined?
Please HELP as we can't afford anymore licensing fees for our company.
oh.. We can't open and close connections on each query as they will be slow.
any suggestions greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

if i understand you question, i don't think this is possible, since the Connection interface (and basically all of the related jdbc interfaces) aren't Serializable.. so they can't be sent over the wire to your client(s).
However, you could feasibly write some server side connection pool, and some server side facade which will allow clients to submit queries (either SQL String's or however you want to do it - obviously a more elegant solution involves a series of classes which dynamically create sql based on query criteria), then the server can grab a connection, execute the query, cycle through the results and populate some result object of your creation and send that back over the wire to your client(s).
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