Re: the meaning of stateless

From a REST perspective, HTTPS is absolutely stateless, because it is
orthogonal to the application state. TCP itself is a stateful protocol. We
just don't see it at the application level. The application is ignorant
that I've dialed the modem, had it connect it's carrier waves and that it's
handshake and compression are working before I tunneled PPP over it in
order to stand HTTPS on top of that.

All of those are stateful in their own right, but have no effect on the
application.

These are separate issues.



On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 10:13 AM, Brian Craft <[email protected]> wrote:

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> On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 3:09 AM, Matt McClure <[email protected]>wrote:
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>> On Apr 21, 2013, at 7:52 PM, Brian Craft <[email protected]> wrote:
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>> Fielding's definition didn't do much for me, because the terms aren't
>> adequately defined, and there aren't enough examples to clarify his intent.
>> Also, some of the claims seem to be at odds with practice. Again, the "POST
>> to query" thing involves storing state between requests, while Fielding
>> says RESTful APIs are better because of "not having to store state between
>> requests". Well, which is it?
>>
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>> I think a key distinction is creating and destroying resources vs. other
>> kinds of state. The former is a key feature of REST.
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> That's very much the impression I'm getting: that it's not generically
> server-side state that is the key issue. It's something to do with the
> difference between explicitly created state that can be directly referenced
> with a URL vs. implicit state. If that is what it's about, then "stateless"
> should be qualified, and some of the claims should be relaxed.
>
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