On Fri, 13 May 2005, Bruce Butterfield wrote:
Eric Merritt wrote:
As for storing system data on the client, that's never a good idea for reasons I hope are obvious.
Agree about system data but it does bring up the interesting arguments about REST-ful (read highly-scalable) web applications where state maintenance is pushed onto the client vs. server sessions. I realize this is a bit off-topic but I think that continuations (suitiably sped-up and obfuscated, perhaps?) on the client side could be a reasonable design for future applications.
I am of that advice. With a compact enough (signed or encrypted) object representation it might become practical and useful to store the continuation on the client's side.
This solves the problem of when to time out sessions on the server's side. Also, the data isn't stored in a centralized place on the servers, which could help to do load balancing.
I don't think the problem is solved just yet.
Guillaume
PS- In the context of this discussion, I suggest having a look at Anton Van Straaten's LL4 slides:
"Continuations continued: The REST of the computation" http://ll4.csail.mit.edu/slides/rest-slides.pdf