Hi Kenneth,
The SOAP specs really speaking say nothing about maintaining sessions!
That is the main reason, why different toolkits use different mechanisms to
maintain session between the Server and the client.
It is true that Apache SOAP does this using cookies!
But personally speaking, I think that this is not a very good mechanism. The
reason being, that SOAP is NOT limited to be implemented over HTTP. Now if
the sessions are maintained using HTTP headers (in this case cookies), then
this is bound to lead to problems, when clients which want to use SOAP over
some other protocol, try to connect to this server. They will not be able to
set cookies and hence this will lead to a loss of session.
So I think that this is leading to interoperability issues, in so far as
implementing SOAP over different protocols is concerned!
But again, if you implement session maintenance using SOAP headers (As
MS-SOAP toolkit does), then also there are issues!
Since SOAP Specs dont really speak anything about session maintenance, so
different servers are going to implement session, in difference ways! This
way again if a client wants to connect to a SOAP server, he needs to know
how to set those headers, so that session is maintained!
But still I think that using SOAP headers to maintain session is a better
idea than using cookies!
Currently, I dont think that Apache SOAP provides an easy way to set SOAP
headers.
Hope that it helps.
with warm regards,
Paramdeep
----- Original Message -----
From: "Kenneth C. Wilner" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Friday, December 14, 2001 3:49 AM
Subject: Maintaining context in SOAP
> I apologize if this was recently asked, as I am new to this list.
>
> What are the tradeoffs relative to using cookies (HTTPSession) vs. the
SOAP
> header for maintaining context on the server side? The SOAP "spec" seems
to
> imply that SOAP headers should be used for this purpose. The Apache SOAP
> doc seems to be pushing using cookies.
>
> I'm mainly concerned (I think) with interoperability issues with other
> SOAP/Web Services platforms.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Ken
>
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