Re: Stateful Web Services...

In article <[email protected]>,
Cristóvão Bento <[email protected]> writes:

> Although there is one last thing that is confusing me. A Web Service
> life is controled by a Web Server like for example Tomcat. When a
> request arrives, the class that implements the request is
> dynamically loaded and the request is executed. When the request
> ends the class is deallocated. This means this class cannot maintain
> its internal state. Any kind of data that was kept by it is garbage
> collected.

Nobody sys that you need something like Tomcat to implement a web
service.  A small Perl script, started by inetd, would do likewise.

If you want to maintain state, you need two things:
1. A stable "backend" where you can store state, independent of the
   lifetime of the code implementing the web service
2. A way to identify the requestor for whom you want to maintain
   state, something like a cookie.