Wireless Java

Wireless Session Tracking

The term session tracking means maintaining state information about a series of requests from the same client. Maintaining such information for clients that use HTTP is a problem. Why? Because HTTP is a request-response protocol, which means the connection between the client and the server is not maintained for the duration of the conversation. In other words, HTTP is a stateless protocol. This means you cannot depend on the underlying connection protocol to maintain state information; you must find other ways to perform session tracking.

The two most widely used techniques for session tracking are cookies and URL rewriting. A cookie is a piece of data that a Web server sends to the client. This piece of data is stored by the client and used the next time the client makes a request from that server. However, if cookies are disabled by the browser or, more importantly, if the browser itself does not support them (as is the case with most current wireless devices), then cookies are not of much use. However, you can send and receive cookies through the use of the HttpConnection.setRequestProperty( ) and HttpConnection .getHeaderField( ) methods. To send a cookie to a server, simply set the value of the cookie request property before sending the message.

String myLocalCookieVariable;

HttpConnection connection = (HttpConnection)Connection.open(someURL);
Connection.setRequestProperty("cookie", myLocalCookieVariable);

When you receive a response back from the ...