Retrieve image from blob via Hibernate (not JDBC)

I've found very nice solution of retrieving images from db/blob thanks to How to retrieve and display images from a database in a JSP page?

But this is solution that uses JDBC connection on every image request.

I'm using Spring 3 annotations and Hibernate 3.

I tried to do similar thing by my 'imageService', which is autowired by annotation in ImageServlet class, but I got nullPointerException, which means that may imageService is not set by Dependency Injection.

Is there any way how to solve that? I don't like to make single jdbc connection on image request.