Patent ID: 7200665

Claim:
A data service system, comprising: a plurality of web servers, each servicing any request received by the data service system; a plurality of application servers, each processing any request directed from any one of the web servers; and a session state information managing system separate from the application and web servers and called by each of the application servers to allow different application servers to process requests belonging to a single session without requiring the requests to carry entire session state information, wherein the session state information managing system stores and distributes session state information to the application servers without requiring the application and web servers to store any session state information to process requests, and wherein the session state information managing system (1) maps the session state information to a sequence of bytes using a marshaling algorithm, (2) maps the sequence of bytes to a digest using a hash algorithm, and (3) maps the digest to a character string using an encoding algorithm to form a state reference.