The Apache Jakarta Project has released Commons-DBCP 1.2.2, a library for pooling database connections. According to the web page, "Creating a new connection for each user can be time consuming (often requiring multiple seconds of clock time), in order to perform a database transaction that might take milliseconds. Opening a connection per user can be unfeasible in a publicly-hosted Internet application where the number of simultaneous users can be very large. Accordingly, developers often wish to share a 'pool' of open connections between all of the application's current users. The number of users actually performing a request at any given time is usually a very small percentage of the total number of active users, and during request processing is the only time that a database connection is required. The application itself logs into the DBMS, and handles any user account issues internally." DBCP 1.2.2 fixes bugs and removes the dependence on Commons Collections. (Yay! Every dependency you can remove is a good thing.)