[Web-SIG] and now for something completely different!

[Ian Bicking]

Phillip J. Eby wrote:
> Of course, I personally prefer to use whatever the application's storage 
> is for my session management, so I'll probably have little reason to get 
> involved in the "storage" side of the session equation.  Indeed, I'd 
> argue that applications that *don't* put their session data in the 
> application's main DB should have very very good reasons for doing so, 
> and I've never heard a good enough reason yet.  :)  Well, there's, "my 
> application's DB suxors", but that means you ought to upgrade the 
> application DB instead if you can.  :)

There's useful reasons for non-application code to store things in the 
session, and the particulars of the application storage aren't really 
applicable.  For instance, with this pattern: 
http://blog.ianbicking.org/web-application-patterns-status-notification.html 
-- you put transient messages in the session.  But there's no point to 
using a fancy application session storage which means documentation and 
configuration and whatnot.  Maybe you have no impediments to throwing 
random data into your application data stores, but I do.

I think there's quite a few other use cases for this same kind of thing 
which I think implies that there should be a standard generic location 
to store session information.  Or you can ignore that and use the 
session ID only.

-- 
Ian Bicking  /  ianb at colorstudy.com  /  http://blog.ianbicking.org