How And When The Database Release A Row Lock

We are using the following statement to obtain a row lock in a table in the database(ORACLE 10G), SELECT * FROM {TABLE_NAME} WHERE ID = 1 for update and if we succeed grabbing the row lock we will continue to issue a update statement every 30 seconds to preserve the lock as far as possible. here is the update statement to preserve the lock,

UPDATE {TABLE_NAME} SET time = ? WHERE ID = 1.

As you see more longer we keep holding the row lock , more update statements are submitted in the pending transaction. In normal case our application can grab the exclusive row lock and works for a long time,however sometimes a connection reset exception is thrown and our application will close the connection(I assume the pending transaction will be rolled back by the database) and exit the JVM. Since other applications will keep trying to grab the same row lock to become the master role, we expect one of them can succeed but they are all failed because the database has not released the row lock as expected. how and when the row lock can get released in our use case?