Srinivasan S (Systems Engineering Group) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>i have a doubt regarding the session tracking. Just take the hotamil for
>sample, i am requesting the browser to show my account email and it is
>showing it correctly at the same time remembe lot of people shall access
>that database. I agree a unique id is given to me, how that it is used in
>future referneces i.e when i again click the inbox to check out my mails
>how it is perfectly showing my account emails. How my id numbe is
>corectly selected from the pool and its action is invoked?? Can anyone
>explain me what is that going in background so that i shall clear my
>doubts regarding session tracking.
Hotmail could be doing one of many things. Here's two possibilities:
1. (Less likely, but simple) Hotmail has one huge POP server. When you log
in to their site with your username and password, it saves a cookie on your
hard disk containing your username and your password, perhaps in some
encrypted form. It then connects to the POP server with your username and
password, gets your mail, and then displays it. The next time you come to
the site, it reads your username and password from your cookie (there should
be 0 or 1 hotmail username/password cookies on your computer), and uses them
to log into the POP server. So in this case, the unique ID is your username
and password.
2. (More likely) Hotmail has a big relational database. It has a user table,
which includes information such as your name, username, password,
preferences, etc. When you are added as a new user, a new row is added to
the table and the database automatically assigns a unique ID to that row.
That ID is saved on your hard disk as a cookie. The next time you connect to
Hotmail, the ID is read from your cookie and is used to select your username
and password from the user table, which are then used to log into the POP
server and get your mail. (Or perhaps the mail is also stored in the
database, but that's not important to the cookie discussion.) So in this
case, the unique ID is the unique ID of the row of the user table that
contains your user information.
Regarding session tracking, doesn't your servlet engine handle all the
session tracking for you? (Or are you just trying to understand what the
engine is doing?)
Erik
___________________________________________________________________________
To unsubscribe, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and include in the body
of the message "signoff SERVLET-INTEREST".
Archives: http://archives.java.sun.com/archives/servlet-interest.html
Resources: http://java.sun.com/products/servlet/external-resources.html
LISTSERV Help: http://www.lsoft.com/manuals/user/user.html
