[xwiki-users] XWiki & External Database

Hello Friends, I have been asked to connect an external database with XWiki (XWiki will be used as the application & MySql as the database). I am using XWiki Enterprise 1.7.14685 :: MySql 5.0. The external database (let's call it titan) is on the same mysql instance (port) as XWiki database itself. The requirement is to fetch user input (in terms of check boxes, radio buttons & text boxes) from XWiki page and insert it into database. Also, some degree of read operation from the database is required. I've been able to read from my external database using the following code directly in my XWiki page (under XWiki 1.0 syntax): <% import groovy.sql.Sql def sql = Sql.newInstance("jdbc:mysql://localhost:3306/titan", "root", "test", "com.mysql.jdbc.Driver") sql.eachRow("select * from user"){ println "${it.user}" } %> Hence, I am confident that an update or insert operation can be performed with ease too (thanks to the groovy page at http://groovy.codehaus.org/Database+features). But I am not familiar with how to retrieve session parameters from the page context. Could someone please guide me to a resource or a working example of fetching context variables/parameters. Maybe it is a very simple solution, but I have very little background in velocity. Any help would be much appreciated. Also, any time-frame on the page rating feature which is being discussed very often now?(what version we could expect to see it?). Also, would page rating be available for all the documents in an existing wiki (as in embedded in the velocity templates) or would it be available only for newly created pages/documents. Thank you everyone...