RE: cookies and sessions

[Wouter Cloetens <wc...@raleigh.ibm.com>]

On Sat, 19 Aug 2000 17:57:26 -0500, Brent G wrote:

>couldn you alleviate the need for cookies by forcing the http1.1 session to
>stay alive?

I guess you mean a keepalive connection. This is not necessarily HTTP 
1.1, nor does an HTTP 1.1 connection always implement keepalive.

The keepalive connection is only between two legs of a connection - it 
does not survive a proxy in between. The server can also close the 
keepalive connection any time it sees fit. And, last but not least, there is no 
state maintained between subsequent requests over a keepalive 
connection. It is not exposed to the servlet engine. So no, that doesn't help.

>maybe I am missing something here but cookies sole purspose
>seems to get around the stateless nature of http

Correct.

>where a keep-alive on the
>http connection seems to cure this headache.

No, that's not its design goal... Read the HTTP 1.1 RFC for a clear 
understanding.

bfn, Wouter
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