HTTP State Management Mechanism

STATE AND SESSIONS

This document describes a way to create stateful sessions with HTTP requests and responses. Currently, HTTP servers respond to each client request without relating that request to previous or subsequent requests; the technique allows clients and servers that wish to exchange state information to place HTTP requests and responses within a larger context, which we term a “session”. This context might be used to create, for example, a “shopping cart”, in which user selections can be aggregated before purchase, or a magazine browsing system, in which a user’s previous reading affects which offerings are presented.

There are, of course, many different potential contexts and thus many different potential types of session. The designers’ paradigm for sessions created by the exchange of cookies has these key attributes:

1. Each session has a beginning and an end.

2. Each session is relatively short-lived.

3. Either the user agent or the origin server may terminate a session.

4. The session is implicit in the exchange of state information.

Struts中谈到的session

2.2 JavaBeans and Scope

Within a web-based application, JavaBeans can be stored in (and accessed from) a number of different collections of “attributes”. Each collection has different rules for the lifetime of that collection, and the visibility of the beans stored there. Together, the rules defining lifetime and visibility are called the scope of those beans. The JavaServer Pages (JSP) Specification defines scope choices using the following terms (with the equivalent servlet API concept defined in parentheses):