Re: If you do away with server-side state, you don't need cookies

Whether you send the data to the client as a hidden field in a form, or as a cookie it's basically the same thing. And by using a cookie you can be sure that the data will be in every request the user sends (GET's, links, images, media, etc) from then on, not just the results of a form.

While this would reduce the need for server side storage of sessions, this can already be done. There are lots of people who instead of sending a session id in the cookie (or hidden field) will send a serialized version of an object or hash which they can then unserialize at the next request.

-- More people are killed every year by pigs than by sharks, which shows you how good we are at evaluating risk. -- Bruce Schneier

Comment on Re: If you do away with server-side state, you don't need cookies

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Re^2: If you do away with server-side state, you don't need cookies by tmoertel (Chaplain) on Jul 05, 2005 at 17:07 UTC
Whether you send the data to the client as a hidden field in a form, or as a cookie it's basically the same thing. Not really. The complete-state-in-a-form method allows for easy session forking. It also allows users to undo state transitions by backing up into the browser history. Cookies don't support either of these. Cheers, Tom Tom Moertel : Blog / Talks / CPAN / LectroTest / PXSL / Coffee / Movie Rating Decoder	[reply]
Re^3: If you do away with server-side state, you don't need cookies by adrianh (Chancellor) on Jul 06, 2005 at 10:49 UTC
Not really. The complete-state-in-a-form method allows for easy session forking. It also allows users to undo state transitions by backing up into the browser history. Cookies don't support either of these. Session forking isn't that hard with IDs (whether cookie or URL based). Just have the ID index into a tree of state transitions on the server side. It's something I've done on several sites (and I've a vague memory that somebody has implemented a CPAN module that makes doing this fairly simple, but am to lazy to go find it :-) Keeping the state server side can be handy, and having a small ID means I can stick it in a URL and have a more RESTful bookmarkable API.	[reply]


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