At 10:33 PM 8/17/2005 -0400, michael bayer wrote: >its usually not my experience either, and I have rarely written any kind >of app that uses sessions. 99% of everything I've done relies upon >browser state as well. although despite my being there "when the web was >won" in 95, I am hesitant to call myself a RESTFUL developer...to me, REST >seems to be taking some common sense ideas and turning them into some kind >of rigid ideological crusade, which is just as bad as all the other >ideological crusades we "web winners" had to fight with IIS and active >server pages, EJB, UML, SOAP, etc.
I agree; I just find it useful to use the REST banner because before that word came around, there was nothing to call the approach. I'm a pragmatic RESTee in that browsers don't do PUT and DELETE so POST is pretty much what we have to work with for human-usable applications today. >a document editing system is also a good example of where objects need to >be persisted in two different scopes, i.e. a session-scope as well as a >permanent scope. I dont really think a session has anything to do with a >"physical three-tiered model". physically, it can be whereever you >want. i just think its advantageous from a conceptual point of view. I don't object to server-side objects that are session-specific; I object to the "bag of arbitrary objects" session interface, that is typically stored in a web tier or middle tier. Those are two distinct sins that are usually coupled in what most people think of as "a session". When I say I consider sessions harmful, it's specifically those two characteristics of the common meaning of the term. I'm not saying that I think there's no such thing as a "session" in the sense of a browsing session. Shopping carts would be pretty hard to do, for example, without session-specific server-side objects. I just think that storing the shopping cart data in anything other than your application database is almost certainly a Very Bad Idea. _______________________________________________ Web-SIG mailing list Web-SIG@python.org Web SIG: http://www.python.org/sigs/web-sig Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/web-sig/archive%40mail-archive.com