[Zope] Preserving Settings during a user's session

[Jeff Bauer]

>> I was thinking more initially about just a ticket 
>> dispenser, than a session manager.  It's purpose 
>> would be to assure a unique id is passed to each
>> requestor, possibly storing some information
>> passed to it during the request phase.

> I don't see wherewas this is really a different 
> issue, honestly.

In my particular situation I might have more than
one way to manage the sessions, but would be willing
to use a single session id assignment system.  It may 
be that the difference between assignment and management
collapses and I'm talking about a single management layer, 
but I think I'll keep them separate for the time being.

> Whether it's persistent or not is a different question, 
> but that seems to be the only different in my view.

By persistent, you are referring to the session state
or the session id?

[ stuff about firewalls/proxies ]

> So why wouldn't XML-RPC work across HTTP?  This was my 
> option, not across some other protcol.  Heck, ILU work 
> across HTTP and I've heard of people making it work thru
> firewalls.  XML-RPC though on thought does seem like a
> good option, since it's standards based, and relatively
> light-weight.

About the only thing I'm confident these days working
across the myriad kinds firewalls (and what passes for
firewalls) are: http, ftp, telnet (though usually disabled
if the administrator has any authority) and (usually) ssl.
Stating that a particular protocol runs on top of http
isn't an automatic guarantee that it will work across
http proxies.  Visigenic's Visibroker fails (although I
had to set up a demonstration to convince them) on their
client-side http tunneling.  People who have gotten ILU
to work across firewalls may have had more success than
I, apparently.  My experiences are also about 12 months
dated.  I don't doubt that any given protocol (e.g iiop) 
can be made to work across any given firewall,  but I 
don't have the time or resources to concentrate on 
this effort -- if any applications are to ever get
written. ;-)

All this may be water under the bridge, given your useful 
followup message to Mike Pelletier.

> my comment was directed to the server->session-server
> communications.

This being the case, my comments regarding firewall issues
are hardly relevant.

--- interlude ---

Long-term, I'm not comfortable with making distinctions
between clients (where a client is always assumed to be
a browser) and servers, except as roles that distributed
objects adopt at different times.  xml-rpc may offer
some interesting ways to address these issues.  My own
(limited) experience suggests that it may require some
effort before objects can easily communicate across
firewalls.  I welcome anyone else's thoughts on this
subject.

Disclaimer:  I am not a firewall/security/network protocol
specialist.  Please feel free to view all comments above
with suspicion or even outright disbelief.

Best regards,

Jeff Bauer
Rubicon, Inc.