I'm looking for a design pattern that someone must have already thought through so that my head can stop hurting. Here's the problem:
I'm designing a webapp that has several servlets that all access a database (or a couple of databases, actually) to either update or retrieve information.
Rather than initializing these connections multiple times, dealing with SQLExceptions in every class that uses JDBC queries, and generally doing things multiple times, I thought I'd put all the database stuff into a single class. I created a setUp() method that initialized the database connection and then used static methods so I could do something like
SQLUtils.executeQuery("a SQL statement");
SQLUtils.executeUpdate("another one");anywhere in my webapp. If the database connection had not been created, it got created before executing the SQL statement. If it was already created, it just got done. I handled all the nastiest exceptions in the SQLUtils class, so I didn't have to deal with them elsewhere.
You can probably guess the next part. I've discovered I need to connect to more than one database, and this design does not support that. Creating instances of a SQLUtil class would be a big pain, because then I have to pass those around between my servlets and I lose one of the huge advantages of this approach, namely a single, globally visible interface to the database.
I thought about multiple classes, one for each database I'm connecting to, but I know that can't be right on so many levels. Meanwhile, I'm a little stumped.
How do people handle this elegantly? The requirements are: a single, globally visible (within a webapp) database interface and the ability to access multiple databases easily.
Thanks in advance for any ideas, Todd
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