Hello.
I am very new to servlets (been doing lots of reading recently :-) and
am still a bit confused by these two methods of session tracking and how
they interact (or don't :-) with each other. I have spent a decent chunk
of today reading over the SERVLET-INTEREST archives looking for posts about
session tracking and they have indeed answered some of my questions.
However...
(1) When one says one is "using URL rewriting", that simply means the
servlet/JSP developer is choosing to use functions to encode/rewrite
URLs before those URLs are placed into the response being sent back
to the browser, right? And it is something the developer has to
explicitly do himself -- unless he calls the encode functions to
rewrite the URLs, URLs don't get rewritten?
(2) [perhaps this is better sent to JSP-INTEREST] But what happens to
URLs in JSP pages that are not inside of scriptlet code? Are they
automatically rewritten by the server when it interprets the pages
or are they left alone? If they are rewritten, what happens if the server
detects that the browser is cookie-enabled? Will those "embedded" URLs be
rewritten then? And if they're not rewritten ever, what then? How do
you track sessions when a browser goes to one of those URLs?
(3) Does it make sense to use both technologies? In other words, use
cookie-based session tracking if the browser is cookie-enabled otherwise
use URL rewriting? And if so, how is this done? Do you need if/else tests
in your code everytime a servlet/scriptlet emits an URL (one arm of the
test would encode the URL before sending and the other arm would just send
the "raw" URL) or do you just unconditionally call the encode functions and
they simply do null encoding when cookie-based tracking is being used [my
scanning of the API indicates this is the case -- the encode functions only
actually change the URL "when needed"]? If the former (you need to use an
if/else), why not use only URL rewriting when you want to support
"cookieable"
and "non-cookieable" browsers? If the latter, why not always call the
encode functions -- if cookies are working the URLs won't be rewritten, and
if they are not working, the URLs will be rewritten -- guaranteeing you can
work with the browser regardless of the browser's cookie capability?
Rich Carreiro [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Senior Software Engineer +1 781 994-1135
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