note
tmoertel
<blockquote><em>How does this eliminate the need for cookies? ... No matter how much you can save on the server side, HTTP is stateless and you need some piece of data coming from the client to indicate that this request is tied to a previous request ...</em></blockquote>
If you can represent the entire state compactly enough, you can send it back to the client with every response and receive it from the client with every request. Now you don't need to store any state on the server, nor do you need cookies on the clients.
<p>For example, take a look at <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-freiburg.de/~thiemann/haskell/WASH/">Web Authoring System Haskell</a>. It records a journal of client-server interactions, sends this journal to the client as part of every response (in a hidden field in an HTML form), and when the form is submitted, it replays the journal on the server to recreate the state.
<p>Cheers,<br>Tom
<!-- Node text goes above. Div tags should contain sig only -->
<div class="pmsig"><div class="pmsig-109406">
<p><small><strong>Tom Moertel</strong> : <a href="http://community.moertel.com/">Blog</a> / <a href="http://community.moertel.com/ss/space/Talks">Talks</a> / <a href="http://search.cpan.org/~tmoertel/">CPAN</a> / <a href="http://community.moertel.com/LectroTest">LectroTest</a> / <a href="http://community.moertel.com/ss/space/PXSL">PXSL</a> / <a href="http://community.moertel.com/ss/space/A+Coder%27s+Guide+To+Coffee">Coffee</a> / <a href="http://community.moertel.com/ss/space/IMDB+Movie-Rating+Decoder+Ring">Movie Rating Decoder</a></small></p>
</div></div>
472498
472507