Maintaining State
- HTTP is a stateless protocol
- Each request is completely independent of the previous
- Most applications need to understand the current state of
the application.
- The pervasive "shopping cart"
- Personalization
- Workflow
How can you maintain state?
State must either be completely part of the request (hidden or form
fields or cookies), or maintained on the server
- Cookies - simple data
- Sessions - data for a current session (across pages)
- Databases - persisting data across sessions (next lecture)
