Just a thought:
From a technical point of view, are there any other possiblities of implementing the JavaScript global scope.I assume this is a question. The request is obviously not good at this
and the servlet context is way too broad. Any other mechanism would be a
data container associated in some way to the state of the webapp
execution and this is exactly what a session is.
Pier described a very good use-case which applies to pretty much every real-world web application - that basically it is understood to re-entrant. From my experience, storing state in the session has two issues - first is the 'forked UI syndrome' described, and the second is that resources associated with the state are held indefinitely, especially if the user decides not to complete the operation, as is their choice.
My solution in the past has been to manage state / flow in the response (ie.
that sent back to the user), but obviously this is what Flow is trying to
improve.
So, my thought is this - can the flow state be included in the response for
re-submission later. For example, a flow-invoked HTML serializer could
insert hidden input fields to maintain state, or similar?
Mmmh... don't take it as an offense, but I think you missed what is brought by continuations.
The global context, attached to the session, should be used to store values that don't depend on the current interaction flow. These will be mainly the user credentials, and any singleton values attached to the user (can be a shopping cart for example).
Transient state, describing the current interaction with the user, should be held by local variables in the flow function that drives this interaction. This means that they're attached not to the session, but to the continuation, and therefore can have different values if the UI is forked.
So the flow state is transmitted through a single value, the continuation identifier, which can be either in a hidden field or in the submit URI.
Hope this helps.
Sylvain
-- Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies http://www.apache.org/~sylvain http://www.anyware-tech.com { XML, Java, Cocoon, OpenSource }*{ Training, Consulting, Projects }
