[wsrp] On Transient Thingies - Relation to Sessions (3/3)

[Eilon Reshef <eilon.reshef@webcollage.com>]

Title: Message

Hi All,

 

In continuation on the previous two notes, and assuming that this note doesn't become obsolete after today's joint committee call, here's a quick note on the conceptual difference between Transient Thingies and sessions.

 

Clearly, a single session may serve multiple portlets, and TransientThingies are not meant to be so, for the reason described in the previous notes.

 

However, if we allow the Producer to change the Transient Thingies in each operation, then Transient Thingies become a superset of sessions and sessions can be easily implemented easily using Transient Thingies (which leads to think that we don't need the concept of a session as a separate concept).

 

So, for example, if a portal puts two portlets on the page served by the same remote portlet container, then the portal calls the container asking for two Transient Thingies. The container can encode the session as part of the Transient Thingy, e.g.,

 

createTransientThingy(1) returns "X1-ABD223" (id-session-id)

createTransientThingy(2) returns "X2-ABD223" (id-session-id)

 

When subsequent calls to the Producer transfer the TransientThingy, the Producer (the portal container, for example) can extract the session ID - if appropriate - also the transient identity of the individual portlet within that session.

 

Cheers,

Eilon