Yup, you can.
From within that method, the entire J2EE/JEE5 library is available to you. It's more the
Servlet API that places restrictions on what can and cannot be seen. But yeah, you can write all the db access code you want in there! Be careful though, that's a nasty place to see a
JDBC or Hibernate error. Nothing sucks more than your application failing to even initialize the context.
-Cameron McKenzie