J2EE Design Patterns

Resource Pool

A resource pool is a collection of precreated objects that can be loaned out to save the expense of creating them many times. Examples of resource pools are everywhere in J2EE. When a connection comes in, a thread is retrieved from a thread pool to handle the request. If the processing requires an EJB, one may be allocated from a pool of EJBs. And if the EJB requires access to a database, the connection will come from—surprise!—a connection pool.

Pools are so prevalent because they solve two problems simultaneously: they improve scalability by sharing the cost of instantiating complex resources over multiple instances, and they allow precise tuning of parallelism and memory use.

To illustrate, let’s discuss the classic use case for pools: database connections. The process of connecting to a database, especially a remote one, can be complex and costly. While it may only require a single method call, instantiating a database connection may involve any or all of the following steps:

1. Instantiate the database connection object.

2. Pass in the database address and user credentials.

3. Create a network connection to the database.

4. Perform a complex handshake to determine supported options.

5. Send user credentials to database.

6. Verify the user’s credentials.

After all of these steps, the connection is finally ready to use. It’s not just expensive in terms of time, either. The connection object must store many of the options it is passed, so each connection requires a fair bit of memory, too. ...