
Ask HN: Why using server session store? - revskill
HTTP is stateless, API for mobile app is stateless, so why does web application makes HTTP stateful by storing user data in its store ?
======
andrewfromx
Well HTTP is stateless but in that form it isn't much fun. So to get around
this years ago web apps decided to store state from one request to the next
and a whole new world opened up. The whole concept of having a user being
logged in or not logged in comes from this. And the whole idea of when logged
in as userA you see something different than userB logged in somewhere else.

You can think about it like a deli counter ticket number system. Each
stateless HTTP request comes in and gets assigned a number. When that user
makes their next request to the HTTP server, it sends along it's number. And
this is all done behind the scenes with cookies. Your ticket number is a
cookie, when you are given a cookie, u present that same cookie each time you
come back. So the guy at the counter knows your ticket 45 and the other guy is
ticket 98.

So once you have a system where the 1st http request without a cookie gets
assigned a number and every request it makes in the future will contain that
number, voila, HTTP is now stateful.

