Over the weekend I've checked in the stateful control feature. It provides a light-weight way of persisting state in the session (although cookies could be used as well), across multiple requests.
The new Stateful interface exposes two methods: public Object getState(); public void setState(Object state); Each control is responsible for setting and getting it's own state. A Field might only store it's value, while a Table could store it's page number and sorted column. Click-extra controls still need to be implemented. Bob
