connection pool and reconnect to database

Hi,

I'm currently working on the migration of an application from oracle to
postgresql.

I'm using a org.postgresql.jdbc3.Jdbc3PoolingDataSource to manage the
connections.

Everything works find, except that I'm forced to restart the application
whenever the postgresql server is restarted.

Since the application is server based (running inside tomcat) and runs
on a different server this introduces additional dependencies I'd prefer
to avoid.

Is there any way to have the connection pool detect the case of broken
database connections and try to create new ones?
How do others handle this issue?

I'm using postgresql 8.0beta4 with pg80b1.308.jdbc3.jar and java 1.4.2_04
on linux.

regards
Morus