Java Programming with Oracle JDBC

Guidelines for Choosing a Connection Strategy

Of the four strategies outlined in this chapter, a cached connection strategy is best suited for dynamic content that does not need to be kept secure -- for example, a public web site that produces its content by retrieving information from a database. If you intend to use authentication to limit your connection audience to a select group of users but don’t need to keep track of who’s making changes to data, the cached connection strategy is still the most efficient. However, you’ll need to add a layer of code to your servlets to prompt the user for authentication and to verify their credentials against an application-maintained list of valid users. You’ll also need to store the resulting authorization in a cookie or session object in order to maintain it from one servlet call to the next. You can even use a cached connection for a form processing application, but you will need to use an even more elaborate authenticate-and-store methodology. By the time you’re done adding all the extra code to your servlets to manage the authentication process, it may just be easier to use a session connection.

If you have an application that requires a high level of security, then a session-based connection is a better fit. One example of such an application is a medical application in which each transaction needs to be logged to an audit trail showing who added or modified data. With a session-based connection, you can have each application user log ...