SE452: Sessions [5/16]

In web applications, the concept of a session is used to put consecutive requests and responses in context

Implicit in a session are the following concepts:

• start and end
• may be terminated by either party
• state information is present

The concept of session tracking allows stateful information to be stored on the server and associated with a specific client

Since HTTP is stateless, the identification of a specific session is needed in each request

This can be accomplished using:

• Cookies
  • Cookies have to be enabled
  • Cookie sessionCookie = new Cookie("jsessionid", "1234");
• URL-rewriting
  • Need to encode the URL every time you write it
  • http://host/path/file.html?jsessionid=1234
• Hidden form fields
  • All pages need to be created dynamically to keep the session
  • <input type="hidden" name="jsessionid" value="1234"/>