Re: Statelessness

Jon P. Knight (J.P.Knight@lut.ac.uk)
Tue, 17 May 1994 10:00:54 +0100 (BST)


On Tue, 17 May 1994 burchard@geom.umn.edu wrote:
> HTTP definitely has room to improve as a distributed application
> protocol (in terms of latency, load balancing, etc). But this needs
> to be thought through very carefully before the stateless model is
> abandoned.
>

This is quite true IMHO. It begs the question why are people so intent on
using a stateless protocol for doing inherently non-stateless operations?
HTTP isn't as far as I'm aware intended to become the One True
Protocol(tm) such that nobody will implement anything else. If you need
stateful transactions, why not come up with a separate stateful protocol
rather than breaking the clean statelessness of HTTP which has been so
useful to date?

Jon

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon Knight, Research Student in High Performance Networking and Distributed
Systems in the Department of _Computer_Studies_ at Loughborough University.
* Its not how big your share is, its how much you share that's important. *