Session, state and scalability
In my other life I work with a medium scale web application which has had many different kinds of growing problems over time. One of the most painful one is the issue about "statelessness". If I could only give one recommendation to anyone building a brand new web application, I'd say " go stateless ". But going stateless is not the same as going session-less. One could implement a perfectly stateless web architecture which still uses sessions to authenticate, authorize and track user activity. And to complicate matters further, when I say stateless, I really mean that the server should be stateless, not the client. Basic authentication Most interactive web applications today which allow you to manipulate data in some form require authentication and authorization mechanisms to control access. In the good old days "Basic Authentication " was the most commonly used authentication mechanism. Once authenticated, the browser would send the credentials to