Most Java-based SOAP engine (over HTTP) implementation leverages the Servlet model which allows you to specify whether the service implementation object is "request", or "session", or "application" scope.

But there is no industry standards around this, and there is no way to communicate this stateful behavior in any standardized way. Some companies (I think BEA is one) proposed a SOAP header structure to do the equivalent of cookies, but I don't see a wide adoption there, the closest one I've seen is the "correlation set" idea (actually more powerful than the session model) in BPEL4WS.

Thoughts ??

Rgds, Ricky

At 06:27 PM 1/14/2003 -0500, Anne Thomas Manes wrote:
It depends on the SOAP implementation you're using. Most products don't
support stateful services. Some do: Systinet WASP, Oracle SOAP, Apache SOAP,
maybe a few others. Interoperability is a big issue, though. BEA published a
proposed SOAP extension called SOAP Conversation
(http://dev2dev.bea.com/techtrack/SOAPConversation.jsp), but I don't think
it's getting much traction.

Anne

> -----Original Message-----
> From: David Peterson [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
> Sent: Tuesday, January 14, 2003 5:25 PM
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Stateful Web Services
>
>
>
> Hi All,
>
> I have a bit of a newbie question in relation to web services:
>
> Do SOAP-based web services support the concept of state and persistence?
> That is, can I easily create a web service where state is preserved
> between invocations?
>
> For example, can I create a "bank account" web service, which supports
> deposit(), withdrawl() and getBalance() operations, and have that web
> service preserve the current account balance between separate invocations?
>
> I imagine that I could achieve this with web services by using an
> external persistence component, eg an EJB, or a JDBC call to a database.
> What I want to know is whether I can preserve state internally (inside a
> web service component) by simply declaring an instance variable
> appopriately (e.g. "static" - though this might not be the right
> approach).
>
> On the other hand, is my only "stateful web service" option to use an
> external persistence layer (JDBC or EJB?)
>
> Thanks.
>
> David Peterson
>
>
>



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