Re: [Slightly OT] Session problem with Apache-fronted Cocoon site

[Stephen Winnall]

Ard, Ralph

Thanks for your questions, which have forced me to think harder about  
my problem. I have found a solution by reading the following thread,  
which may be useful for other people:

        http://marc.info/?l=apache-httpd-users&m=116956392724131&w=2

For the record, I'll try to explain more carefully what the problem was.

I use the session cookie (JSESSIONID) to store information about the  
current browser session (locale, but also browser, OS...). From the  
point of view of a Cocoon sitemap, this is "storing data in the  
session" as opposed to creating an explicit cookie or using a query  
string.

When I used the browser to talk directly to Tomcat on port 8084,  
JSESSIONID was passed back and forth correctly and the session data  
was available everywhere. However, when I used Apache HTTPD as a  
reverse proxy in front of Tomcat, JSESSIONID seemed to be getting  
lost for some requests from the browser, so Tomcat created a second  
session. This meant that session data was not available everywhere.  
The cause for the problem was between my ears: I was using two  
different hostnames (localhost and a FQDN), so the browser actually  
had two JSESSIONIDs, one for each hostname. For some reason, the  
different hostnames did not cause a problem between the browser and  
Tomcat, but did cause a problem between the browser and Apache HTTPD.  
If I use the same hostname everywhere, there is just one JSESSIONID.

I hope the explanation above is clear enough. Thanks for helping me  
to think about it!

Steve
        
On 9 Jul 2007, at 10:31, Ard Schrijvers wrote:


Ard,

You didn't really answer his question, but I didn't really
grasp it either.

I thought he meant changing locale in his browser still returning  
the (cached) pages of the other locale....but obviously, I did not  
understand correctly :-)

Ard


When Tomcat or Jetty create a session they are going to
create a token
that represents the session will end up in the user's browser
or as part
of each subsequent request. By design, it is not possible for
multiple
end users to share this session, although I suppose it could
be done if
your proxy "owned" the session. However, I've never heard of a proxy
that would do that.

Can you explain why you would want multiple user's to share a single
session? In fact, why wouldn't you want each user to have
their own locale?

Ralph

Ard Schrijvers wrote:
Hello,

we run all our sites with httpd in front of cocoon (Jetty
or Tomcat), but we are kind of used to not rely on the locale
of the browser, because you cannot be sure all proxies
between the client and your application honour the locale
correctly (you might have proxies in between, for example a
proxy within a company, that caches pages but does not use
the locale..then the first locale gets the page, and
everybody else with different locale's see the same page. We
therefor user /nl, /en, /fr etc as a prefix in the url)

For the rest, I did not totally grasp the picture you
described here, with "changing the locale only the session
....etc". So, either you use the locale in the url, or try to
explain the timeline of events a little better, because i did
not get it. You did configure httpd (if you use mod_cache)
correctly to honour the locale?

Regards Ard



I have a multilingual website implemented with Cocoon 2.1.9 which
runs on top of Tomcat 5.5. I use
org.apache.cocoon.acting.LocaleAction to keep track of the
current
language and have set this up as follows:

     <map:action logger="sitemap.action.locale" name="locale"
src="org.apache.cocoon.acting.LocaleAction">
        <locale-attribute>locale</locale-attribute>
        <create-session>true</create-session>
        <store-in-request>false</store-in-request>
        <store-in-session>true</store-in-session>
        <store-in-cookie>false</store-in-cookie>
        <use-locale>true</use-locale>
        <default-locale language="en"/>
     </map:action>

In other words, I store the current locale in the session.

This works fine when I call up the website directly from
Tomcat (port
8084 in my case). However, I want to use Apache HTTPD 2.0 as a
reverse proxy. I have tried using mod_jk and mod_proxy (as
per http://
wiki.apache.org/cocoon/ApacheModProxy), but more than one
session is
being passed from HTTPD to Tomcat/Cocoon: when I change language,
only the session in which I changed the language gets changed
and the
other remains as it was.

I realise this is slightly off-topic for this list, but I thought
other Cocoon users might have experienced the same thing
and be able
to give me a hint as to how to force HTTPD and Tomcat to use
just one
session. I've spent all day googling, but all I find is
stuff about
load-balancing and sticky sessions when HTTPD is being used with
multiple workers. I just have one worker.

Steve



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