With the Web, however, there is no notion of a session. Web clients issue requests, and Web servers deliver the response and then forget that the interaction happened. As a Web-site builder, you must use other techniques to provide coherent, sessionlike information. To illustrate these techniques, we'll use fragments of WebPad, a Web application from Oracle. It implements a notebook with sheets that contain short notes of as many as a few thousand characters.
Users can give each sheet a subject, which is simply a one-line summary of what a note contains.
In this discussion, we'll look in detail at several pieces of the WebPad application, beginning from the user's first encounter. The user needs to be identified to the application to get started, and then the application can take charge, using the techniques of Oracle7 and the Web standards to deliver a personalized, coherent experience to the user. Registering Rudimentary techniques for identifying users are available in Web standards today but are intended primarily for use in controlling access to documents. Web-site builders can restrict access so that when a user attempts to access a protected document, the browser pops up a dialog box to ask for a name and password it will pass along to the server. Maintaining individual names and passwords for a large number of users is impractical.