first post !!!

hello everybody,
this is my first post to the mailing list ,what i wanted to ask you all is
two
things, this is a simple application non-struts,non-mvc ...
1) i have jsp forms submitting to servlets and servlets connect to the
database and
perform operations on the same....and then redirect the user to
success/failure pages, what ever the case may be.
in each servlet i am opening a connection to the database in the init( )
 method......where should i close the connection.
or please tell me if this is not the correct way to do things....
now in a number of books that i have read, the authors have written
that database connections must be opened in the init() method of the
servlet

2) what are you experiences with poolman as regards to connection pooling


hope that you would reply back.

thanx and regards,
amit malhotra