Avalon Excalibur's DataSource package allows you to manage pooled connections in one of two ways. You can have the package handle it for you, or you can use a J2EE server's DataSource management. It provides the same kind of access regardless of which method you choose, since they are obtained through Avalon's Component Manager infrastructure. The DataSource package requires that you load the necessary driver classes at init time, but it will take care of all necessary issues from there.