[Zope] Preserving Settings during a user's session

[Christopher G. Petrilli]

On Wed, Feb 24, 1999 at 01:58:14PM -0600, Jeff Bauer wrote:
> >> 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.

Maybe we're crossing wires, but I think we're talking about the same
thing here... basically your "ticket" is my "sessionID" we then get into
the discussion of whether or not this information is persistent across
time (and if so, how much).  

Obviously this information must be persistant across SOME value of time
for it to be of any value.  The question for me is whether or not this
piece of information should bring with ti OTHER information referenced
with the sessionID as an index.  Hmm, how to explain this :-)

> > 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?

They are implicitely the same... a "session state" is just an object
associated with a specific session ID.

> [ stuff about firewalls/proxies ]
> 
Now this is just handwaving at this point, but XML-RPC is just a new
mime-type, nothing more.  So as long as your firewall doesn't filter
based on mime-type, or allows you to determine which ones... you should
be OK.  This would be no different than filtering based on image/gif, or
something along that lines.  I believe the MIMe type in question is
text/xml.

> 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.

I agree, but for the foreseeble future, my crystal ball says HTTP/HTML
will continue to dominate the client/server level... what is more
interesting from a Zope perspective is teh server/server middle tier,
which will probably move toward a combination of CORBA and XML.

Chris
-- 
| Christopher Petrilli                      ``Television is bubble-gum for
| petrilli@amber.org                          the mind.''-Frank Lloyd Wright