Chapter 15. Maintaining State with Cookies and Tables
Chapter Objectives
After this lab, you will learn about:
Cookies are one way for anapplication developer to handle the challenge of preserving state on the Web. State refers to information about the current session— the current state of affairs. Applications that maintain information about the user’s experience are described as stateful, whereas protocols like HTTP are by their nature stateless. Each HTTP request from a browser is a separate transaction with a server.
Cookies allow a developer to get around the stateless nature of the HTTP protocol. Cookies and how they work are explored in this chapter. Cookies can be read and manipulated through the components provided in Oracle’s Web Toolkit package OWA_COOKIE. They can also be read and set through the JavaScript DOM.
When used in conjunction with tables, cookies can become a useful tool for tracking user requests and application information. Finally, this chapter shows how cookies can work together with database tables to create lasting records of user activity and interests.