Re: Stateful Web Services...

Hey Walden,

On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 06:55:48PM -0500, Walden Mathews wrote:
> That is certainly confusing, but the underlying concepts are not
> that clear either, and there's a bigger problem there, I think, in terms
> of understanding scaleability tradeoffs.
> 
> Here's a stateful interaction:
> 
> C: How much is a ticket from NYC to Boston on the 20th?
> S: $50.
> C: How much is it round trip?
> 
> The "stateless server" principle says that for the server to be able
> to answer the client's second question, it has to sacrifice some
> ability to service larger numbers of clients.
>
> However, if instead of the above, the client posts an incomplete
> order for a ticket, the server creates a resource
> from that, and the client can then complete the order via reference
> to that resource, you technically have a "stateless interaction",

No, you wouldn't, because as you say, the second message would contain a
reference to the resource, but the semantics of that message - if it's
to provide the same expectation as the second message above - would be a
function of the state of that resource.

Who said "State is hell"[1]?  Easy as pie. 8-)

 [1] http://www.artima.com/intv/distrib4.html

Mark.
-- 
Mark Baker.   Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA.        http://www.markbaker.ca