----- Original Message ----- From: "Ricky Ho" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Wednesday, January 15, 2003 14:13 Subject: RE: Stateful Web Services
> Most Java-based SOAP engine (over HTTP) implementation leverages the > Servlet model which allows you to specify whether the service > implementation object is "request", or "session", or "application" scope. > > But there is no industry standards around this, and there is no way to > communicate this stateful behavior in any standardized way. Some companies > (I think BEA is one) proposed a SOAP header structure to do the equivalent > of cookies, but I don't see a wide adoption there, the closest one I've > seen is the "correlation set" idea (actually more powerful than the session > model) in BPEL4WS. I think one of the many GXA specs coming from the sea-tac conurbation include some session header info, at least I recall Don box hinting at it some time last october. The weakness of cookies is they are transport specific and very dependent upon implementations of HTTP, some particular weak implementations (java.net.HttpUrlConnection) handle cookies badly (it used to let you set >1 cookie, but them someone fixed it in 1.3 to stop you doing that). but I like them as they are simple, integrate well with the server, and integrate with load balancing level seven routers, things like ArrowPoints that make sure that requests to a cluster go back to the previous server, provided it is still happy. I dont see any soap header aware routers around, and given the lack of a standard header that isnt surprising, ignoring the details of how hard it would be to buffer and route inbound messages without actually parsing bits of them.
