16.1 Introduction
State maintenance is the process of preserving the state of an end user’s data as he or she navigates the pages of a Web application. This process is necessary because client-server Web applications are stateless , which means that once a server serves a page to a client, the server completely forgets about the client, the page it just served, and the state of any data associated with the page. In other words, once a page has been requested by the client via an HTTP request, and once the server has responded with the page via an HTTP response, any ...
