Re: the meaning of stateless

I've written a little on this before.

See if reading this helps at all, as it talks not so much to state
directly, but to sessions (which is what most folks are struggling
with when it comes to state in REST).

Feel free to hit back with questions.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1296421/rest-complex-applications/1297275#1297275


On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 3:33 PM, Mike Schinkel <[email protected]> wrote:
> On Apr 22, 2013, at 6:21 PM, Will Hartung <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> All mentions of state within the context of REST is TRANSACTION state. A
> TRANSACTION is a process that CHANGES (Creates, changes, or deletes) a
> RESOURCE.
>
>
> The value of a resource is NOT "STATE". The back end application as
> represented by resources and resources have values, and REST systems then
> offer up REPRESENTATIONS of those values.
>
>
> Okay, I think I'm narrowing in on understanding, but still need a bit more
> help.
>
>
> If you want to consider the combination of Resource values managed by the
> Application as "The State of the Application", then that's fine. But that
> "State" is not the same "state" that we talk about when discussing the
> "stateless" nature of REST architectures.
>
>
> I think I'm getting why these are not considered stateful, because you are
> differentiating between application state and some other kind of "bad"
> state, right?  So if "application" state differs, what adjective do we apply
> to the "bad" kind of state?
>
> Also, can you give examples of bad state and explain why it's specifically
> bad in contrast to application state being okay?
>
> Many thanks in advance. This is really helping, at least it's helping me.
>
> -Mike

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