The designers of HTTP would strongly argue that is a major
thing HTTP got right, and is the feature primarily responsible
for it huge success.
Then why is HTTP 2 moving away from it? And Web Sockets?
Clearly, having the choice between keeping state and not keeping
state is preferable to HTTP taking that choice away from you.
Lots of apps also spend quite an effort to mimic stateful
communication
on top of HTTP. Sessions? Authentication tokens? Cookies? Caching
in the browser? HTML5 Local Storage?
No, HTTP did not get "stateless" right.
Your "fix-the-network" problem is definitely valid.
At this point we have mostly focused on ION - the binary object /
message format for IAP.
However, we have a pretty good idea about how IAP will work on a
conceptual
level.
IAP will have a set of "semantic protocols". Each semantic
protocol can address
its own area of concern. File exchange, time, RPC, distributed
transactions,
P2P, streaming etc.
You can also define your own semantic protocol to address exactly
your specific
situation (e.g. the Byzantine Generals Problem - distributed
consensus).
Everything is not yet in place - but we will get there step by
step.
