Applications, Sessions and State
Traditional network based applications have always had one major advantage—the automatic maintenance of state by the network itself. The previous lack of this feature within HTTP has tended to limit the development of true Web-based applications. What do we mean by state? In a traditional local or wide area network, the software (such as Novell, Banyan, or Microsoft's own protocols) combined with features of the operating system in such a way that once a user logged into the network, they could be automatically recognized by all the applications on it.