At 07:45 PM 11/12/2006 -0800, Robert Brewer wrote: >Sessions have 1) been around forever, 2) have consistently been done >similarly for each implementation, and 3) already require interoperation >with third party code (database APIs), so introducing a common interface >would not introduce any overhead. Therefore, session handling would be the >only candidate I see for standardization.
And even sessions are full of potential pitfalls for standardization, due to differences in things like authenticated vs. non-authenticated sessions, retention/expiration policies, and differing limitations on what can be stored. Of course, there are also those persons like myself, who believe that the very concept of sessions as something apart from an application's domain model is the devil's work, doing harm to both the users and the enterprise. ;-) (E.g. ask yourself if Amazon.com uses anything that would be traditionally called a "session" database - their sessions are permanent, identified, and even an anonymous person's shopping cart items are retained for *90 days*. And you can bet dollars to donuts that they can join "session" data to non-session data in their database queries.) So, from my POV, having session bags where you can just dump whatever old data you please, without regard to the application's DB design (not to mention backup/uptime guarantees of the DB service), are things of the vilest evil that should be cast back into the bowels of Microsoft from whence they came, or something like that. :) (I first encountered sessions in MS's early ASP stuff, but perhaps they got the idea from somewhere else.) Anyway, that's basically off-topic except to point out that even if you *are* a Satanis... er, sessionist, ;-), then you can still have wide-ranging disagreements over data retention policy, locking, etc., etc. _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com
