Session management

[Clarence Dahlin <cl...@pitch.se>]

Hi,

 

I'm thinking about the best way of handling sessions for the project I'm
working on. 

I know that most (all?) toolkits handle sessions in the SOAP Header.
Correct me if I'm wrong. In spite of this, my first approach was to send
session data within the SOAP message. The application on the server side
(web service) would then handle the session.

 

What are the benefits of letting the toolkits handle sessions? Is it
much faster and scalable because it doesn't have to "look in" the SOAP
envelope perhaps?

Which is the most common approach to session management?

 

What are the drawbacks of using the "session in message" approach?

 

I would like to be as independent of toolkits as possible. Though I'd
like the client developers to be able to use Axis and other for easy
developing (WSDL2Java).

 

It seems like a client needs to run the client side framework of Axis to
use sessions in SOAP Headers. Is this correct? If so, it would be a
problem for me in this project.

 

We are using the WSDL as an API. I'd like everything to be defined in
the WSDL or the imported XML Schemas. This is one of the reasons why I
didn't choose the SOAP header approach to begin with.

 

Kind regards,

Clarence