Looking back at how far we've come

It’s refreshing once in a while to look back at the big picture of technology you’ve been taking for granted. Often you’ll find yourself impressed and the day to day glitches you gripe about seem trivial.

One such thing for me was JNDI for data sources, I find the casting & lookup annoying, chechking against null is a PITA.

However, I recently had to make changes to an existing servlet that query’s a database for a BLOB based on a parameter in the url and returns the content as an “image/tiff’.

The changes were:

1. A new database, SQL server instead of the existing one. (Sybase ASE I believe)
2. Add connection pooling as there were lots of errors related to running out of connections

Thanks to Tomcat and JNDI data sources all I had to do was change the server.xml to use commons-dbcp, change the connection URL, and add a few jars to common/lib/. Total work including regression testing 3 hours. That is truly outstanding as it’s something that would take a matter of days if not weeks in other applications I’ve worked on. I am now completely sold on the seemingly annoying JNDI stuff. A Total convert!

The Tomcat JNDI DataSource HOWTO was really useful.