It all kind of depends... most of the content is pregenerated such as in Amazon. Amazon uses what is called the ART1 algorithm to categorize users. These categories (java geek, linux guru, etc) are pre-generated web sites, created by some application they have in house (hence the cryptic url).
So when you click around, you are interacting with a page that was generated, along with all of the links. Think of the extra garble as your session state that gets stored in the page you download to your computer vs. being stored in memory on the server. Another example is JSF. JSF allows you to store your state client side or server side. If it's client side, your buttons, etc become POSTs instead of GETs in order to get around the URL length limit. Also, hidden fields are written out with your objects serialized into a string that you repost next time you click a link on the page. -----Original Message----- From: Robert Taylor [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, June 28, 2004 8:51 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [OT] Anatomy of a long URL I'm not sure the subject of this email is indicative of my question, but I have always wondered why amazon, sun, and some financial institutions, use long URL's for invoking actions. My only guess, since I've only worked at small companies where all the applications pretty much run on one machine, is that the URL contains either encoded/sensitive information or contains session information. I'm just wondering why the heck does it look so darn complex. For example, I just downloaded Sun's J2EE 1.4 SDK http://192.18.97.53/ECom/EComTicketServlet/BEGINjsecom16c.sun.com-9660%3A40e 01d9a%3A3099733a3e651ac9/-2147483648/428874567/1/483962/ 483914/428874567/2ts+/westCoastFSEND/j2eesdk-1.4_01-oth-JPR/j2eesdk-1.4_01-o th-JPR:1/j2eesdk-1_4_01-windows.exe after the "/-" then there appears to be some random numbers delimited by forward slashes. Is this some technique for sharing sessions across different applications? My apologies if this is one of those things that "everone" know's about except me. I really wasnn't sure how to google on this topic either, so if there is some general documentation I missed, please point me to it. robert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
