You're right that we'll never have an HTTP request, so I can see why you're confused as to why we'd want a session. The reason is for performance. We want to avoid the overhead of writing and reading a database. This is very short term information, but now that we're needing to run in a load-balanced cluster, we need to be able to handle the situation where requests could, in the worst case scenario, come into each server alternatively. IBM's WebSphere App. Server when running in a cluster will propogate the session to any server that needs it. Thus if we use a session, it'll propogate back and forth between the boxes.The problem you're going to have is that there is no such thing as an HttpSession without an HTTP request. Even if you could do what you propose, it would only make the stored information available to a single user -- that doesn't seem like it will do what you want.
A possible strategy to avoid READING the database on every request is to have a webapp startup method load the data into a servlet context attribute. This will happen on each node the app is deployed to, but will happen only once (before the first request is processed).
SimonCraig
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