From a descriptive perspective I might agree with you. But from a programming API perspective, I am not sure that the Cache modules that exist are so different from the Apache::Session module in terms of how they are coded except maybe that the handle to the cache data and the Apache::Session id is generated conceivably in a different way.
Garbage collection is arguably something that is the domain of the session container as opposed to the session code itself. The session code needs to provide things like when it was last modified, accessed or created so that the session container can sweep out the old sessions based on criteria related to those items I suppose. At 10:10 PM 6/20/2002, Rob Nagler wrote: >Gunther Birznieks writes: > > One thing I would disagree with on Rob's thing below is that a session is > > just a is just a web browser instance associated with a set of data. > > Sessions can be more than just passed over a single browser. You can > always > > have a session that is shared amongst many users to cache data that you > > would like to eventually expire when the user load goes down for example. > > > > A session, is, well... a session. :) How you manage those sessions (user > > cookie, form variable, or across a larger set of users as cache is up to > > your session manager code IMHO...:) > >I think we should differentiate between data caching and sessions. >A data cache is an associative memory, which is probably content >addressed. Sessions is an associative memory, which is user/browser >addressed. The former does not need to be garbage collected, but >sessions do. The system can run without a cache, but from the way >sessions have been described (esp. your eloquent description of tomcat >cache problems :), they need to exist for the system to function. >Caches for performance reasons are critical to large-scale >applications. Sessions for programming convenience reasons are often >detrimental to large-scale systems. > >Rob __________________________________________________ Gunther Birznieks ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) eXtropia - The Open Web Technology Company http://www.eXtropia.com/ Office: (65) 64791172 Mobile: (65) 96218290
