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Yuma Development
Yuma Session Management
Issue: 6.5 (July/August 2008)
Author: Brad Weber
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 5,870
Starting Page Number: 50
RBD Number: 6519
Resource File(s): None
Related Web Link(s):
www.YumaDev.com
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
As you may be aware, the web is inherently stateless. That means that web servers have a very short-term memory when it comes to clients from request to request -- much like the fish Dory in DisneyPixar's Finding Nemo. There is no persistent connection between the web browser and the web server. That worked fine for browsing research materials in the early days of the web. But it doesn't work well at all if you want customers to be able to buy things on a website or access password-protected resources. That's where sessions come in.
A session is something that is established between a web server and web client (e.g., browser) to effectively manage multiple requests from the same client. In order for a web server to correctly identify a particular client, that client has to send identifying information to the server with every request.
Session management is usually handled in one of two ways -- through cookies and URL parameters. You've likely seen session identifiers in site links when you browse some e-commerce sites. It is typically a randomly generated string of letters and numbers to uniquely identify your browser with each request to the server as you click links, navigating through a website (e.g., http://.../?sid=76f86b1f009eacef02e). URL parameters have one advantage over cookies -- they don't require cookies. Users can intentionally disable support for cookies in their browsers and some web-enabled devices may not support cookies. So a URL parameter may be the only way to reliably identify a visitor from page request to page request.
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