Issues of state (was: Tkinter or wxpython?)

[Paul Rubin]

claird at lairds.us (Cameron Laird) writes:
> Others have answered this at other levels.  In elementary terms,
> there truly is a difference, Paul, and one that's widely reified:
> a "desktop client-server" application typically listens through
> one socket, which therefore constitutes an index of the connection
> or client, while a Web application communicates through a sequence
> of independent HTTP transactions.  The latter can manage state only
> to the extent it passes session information around.

Is this significant?  In the case of a single user http app running on
the same computer as the browser, the server should only listen on
127.0.0.1.  Every http hit then almost certainly comes from the same
session.  If there's doubt, the app can always set a random cookie at
the initial screen and check that the cookie never changes.

If there's only a small amount of session state (say up to a few
hundred bytes) you can put it entirely into browser cookies and send
it on every single http hit.