What Is a Session

This section describes what is a session - a concept to represent a series of HTTP requests and responses exchanged between a specific Web browser and a specific Web server.

What Is a Session?: Session is a concept to represent a series of HTTP requests and responses exchanged between a specific Web browser and a specific Web server, as illustrated in the following diagram:

           Server                Browser
ID created  | <-- Request #1  --- |
            | --- Response #1 --> | ID kept as cookie
            | <-- Request #2  --- | ID send back to server
            | --- Response #2 --> |
            | <-- Request #3  --- | ID send back to server
            | --- Response #3 --> |
            |     ......          |

The session concept is managed by the server. When the first request comes from a browser on a new host, the server makes the beginning of a new session, and assigns a new session ID. The session ID will be then sent to the browser as cookie. The browser will remember this ID, and send the ID back to the server in the subsequent requests. When the server receives a request with session ID in them, it knows this is a continuation of an existing session.

When the server receives a request from a browser on a new host (request without a session ID), the server not only creates a new session ID, it also creates a new session object associated with the session ID. See the next tutorial for details.

If there is no subsequent request coming back for a long time for a particular session ID, that session will be timed out. After the session has been timed out, if the browser comes back again with the associated session ID, the server will give an invalid session error.

Table of Contents

 About This Book

 JSP (JavaServer Pages) Overview

 Tomcat Installation on Windows Systems

 JSP Scripting Elements

 Java Servlet Introduction

 JSP Implicit Objects

 Syntax of JSP Pages and JSP Documents

JSP Application Session

What Is a Session

 The "session" Implicit Object

 Passing Values between JSP Pages

 Testing Result of RegForm.jspx

 Using Perl LWP Package for Debugging

 Managing Cookies in JSP Pages

 JavaBean Objects and "useBean" Action Elements

 Managing HTTP Response Header Lines

 Non-ASCII Characters Support in JSP Pages

 Performance of JSP Pages

 EL (Expression Language)

 Overview of JSTL (JSP Standard Tag Libraries)

 JSTL Core Library

 JSP Custom Tags

 JSP Java Tag Interface

 Custom Tag Attributes

 Multiple Tags Working Together

 File Upload Test Application

 Using Tomcat on CentOS Systems

 Using Tomcat on macOS Systems

 Connecting to SQL Server from Servlet

 Developing Web Applications with Servlet

 Archived Tutorials

 References

 Full Version in PDF/EPUB