1.1 --- /dev/null Thu Jan 01 00:00:00 1970 +0000
1.2 +++ b/docs/state.html Sat Apr 30 00:21:44 2005 +0000
1.3 @@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
1.4 +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
1.5 +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
1.6 +<head>
1.7 + <meta content="text/html;charset=ISO-8859-1" http-equiv="Content-Type" />
1.8 + <title>Cookies, Sessions, Users and Persistent Information</title>
1.9 + <meta name="generator"
1.10 + content="amaya 8.1a, see http://www.w3.org/Amaya/" />
1.11 + <link href="styles.css" rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" />
1.12 +</head>
1.13 +<body>
1.14 +<h1>Cookies, Sessions, Users and Persistent Information</h1>
1.15 +<p>Due to the nature of the communications mechanisms
1.16 +involved, Web applications do not have automatic or "magic"
1.17 +knowledge about the people or entities accessing them as application
1.18 +users. Moreover, Web applications do not necessarily remember anything
1.19 +about what that user has done before. Due to this behaviour, where
1.20 +every request must tell the application as much as possible for an
1.21 +operation to be carried out, Web applications are referred to as being
1.22 +"stateless".</p>
1.23 +<p>Yet there are a number of ways of maintaining "state" information -
1.24 +that is, to remember the following things:</p>
1.25 +<ul>
1.26 + <li>Some kind of identify for the user, if only to be able to say
1.27 +that such a user has visited before (if not to actually give them a
1.28 +name).</li>
1.29 + <li>Some details about their previous interactions with the
1.30 +application.</li>
1.31 +</ul>
1.32 +<p>Such state information is typically provided using a number of
1.33 +different mechanisms:</p>
1.34 +<ul>
1.35 + <li><a href="cookies.html">Cookies</a></li>
1.36 + <li><a href="sessions.html">Sessions and Persistent Information</a></li>
1.37 + <li><a href="users.html">Users and Authentication</a></li>
1.38 +</ul>
1.39 +</body>
1.40 +</html>