[Zope-dev] CST not really... :-)

sean.upton@uniontrib.com sean.upton@uniontrib.com
Wed, 29 Aug 2001 14:53:49 -0700


I really like the idea of persistence in the HTTP transport, but Chris is
right... Keepalives are not at all reliable through proxies, and any well
designed app that can take advantage of it ideally should be designed to be
cache-enabled and cache-safe, not to mention proxy safe.  The very fact that
most corporate users go through trans-proxies shoots the persistent
connection idea down, not to mention that it means that one cannot use a
caching http accelerator like Squid or mod_proxy.  

The burden of session tracking should be at the application level, or just
below, not at the transport level.  HTTP is a stateless protocol, which is
something we are going to have to live with, unless persistent connection id
HTTP headers are supported by all browser clients and at least Squid, if not
all the commercial proxies...  Something along those lines would have to be
an official ratified w3c recommendation with major vendor support for that
to happen any time soon.  Such a standard would have to support maintaining
an _application_ session across multiple _transport_ sessions.  If something
like this was made possible in the future, it might be very good for
XML-over-HTTP RPC protocols like SOAP and XML-RPC, but for now... The best
we have for the practical time being is going to have to be cookies, etc...


Sean

-----Original Message-----
From: Chris Withers [mailto:chrisw@nipltd.com]
Sent: Wednesday, August 29, 2001 1:44 PM
To: JXlio Dinis Silva; zope-dev@zope.org
Subject: Re: [Zope-dev] CST not really... :-)


> Any comments? someone thought about this before? someone from CST
> development thought or is thinking on this possibility, i.e, zope
> really core session tracking using http1.1 and no need for
> cookies/forms/url_rewriting?

What happens when your persistent connection breaks for some reason beyond
your control?

What about users going through caching proxies?

cheers,

Chris


_______________________________________________
Zope-Dev maillist  -  Zope-Dev@zope.org
http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-dev
**  No cross posts or HTML encoding!  **
(Related lists - 
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope-announce
 http://lists.zope.org/mailman/listinfo/zope )