How are Servlets and objects in it instantiated?

[Timothy Sam]

Is a servlet instantiated one per user? Or one for the whole application to use? How about objects inside the servlet? Suppose I have a static object in a servlet, is it static for one user or static for the whole application? Thanks!

[Rahul Bhattacharjee]

Originally posted by Timothy Sam:
Is a servlet instantiated one per user? Or one for the whole application to use? How about objects inside the servlet? Suppose I have a static object in a servlet, is it static for one user or static for the whole application? Thanks!

One servlet per application but one thread per user.The variables in servlet both static and non static are not thread safe and there for one instance is shared by the complete servlet.

[Timothy Sam]

So if I made a single connection object to be used by the whole application would that be a problem?

[Ulf Dittmer]

Yes, it would mean that all acesses to the database are serialized through that object. Also, if any of the threads used transactions, and failed to handle them properly, there would be big-time trouble ahead.

[Timothy Sam]

Hmmm... This is bad... I've been doing this for almost all my applications. I'm doing this to an app that is to be published over the internet. So what could ba a good solution then? I'm thinking of the following...


1. Create a single connection for each thread, determine if that thread already has a connection object and if not instantiate one...

2. Just instantiate a connection for every DB transaction.


Aaaaaak! I didn't imagine this to be such a problem!

[Bear Bibeault]

With regards to connections, it's best to rely on the container-managed connection pool. Are you using Tomcat?

[Timothy Sam]

Yes, I am using Tomcat. I saw a sample connection Pool class over this link

http://archive.coreservlets.com/Chapter18.html


Could you please refer me to links about container-managed connection pool? I happen to have a class which I plan to twist and follow the DAO pattern. Will container-managed connection pool adapt to this? Thanks!

[Bear Bibeault]

It's extensively covered in the Tomcat documentation. See previous discussions in the Tomcat forum for more details.

[Timothy Sam]

Thanks Bear! I'll take a look at it right away.

[Ben Souther]

http://tomcat.apache.org/tomcat-5.5-doc/jndi-datasource-examples-howto.html