Servlets and JDBC

Question

I am new to the JDBC API, but I am trying to create a connection to Oracle 11i through JDBC in a Servlet's init() methid. The problem is that I don't seem to be entering my init() method. I get a NullPointerException when I attempt to reference the Connection object that is instatiated in the init() method. Here is my init() method:
public void init(ServletConfig config) throws ServletException {
super.init(config);
try {
//Loads the Oracle JDBC Driver
Class.forName("oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver");
//Connect to the DataBase
con = DriverManager.getConnection ("jdbc:oracle:thin:@63.121.58.32:1526:POAPN003",
"xxrot", "xxrot");
} catch(ClassNotFoundException e){}
catch(SQLException e) {}
If there is anything that you can see that I need to do to get the Connection created correctly, I would really appreciate the help. I have created the Connection con as an instance variable.

Answer 1

I think that the main problem that I am having though is that the init() method isn't throwing the exceptions. When I try to create a Statement object in order to create some SQL, that is when I get the NullPointerException. Here is the code that I found thru debugging that gave me the exception.
try {Statement stmt = con.createStatement();
//if(v_Customer_no != null)
       //   rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT *");
    // else
         // rs = stmt.executeQuery("SELECT * FROM ROT_PRODUCT where Customer_ID="+ v_customer_id +
                                    //  "AND Inventory_Item_ID="+ v_product_id);
         }catch (Exception e) { System.out.println("Here is the first error"); }
Since I commented out all of the code in this try block, I found that the exception had to be when I was creating the Statement from the Connection object. That is why I thought that the error may have occurred in the init() method where the Connection is first dealt with. Any other thoughts then? Thanks for the help.