Writing Apache Modules with Perl and C

Chapter 5. Maintaining State

If you've ever written a complicated CGI script, you know that the main inconvenience of the HTTP architecture is its stateless nature. Once an HTTP transaction is finished, the server forgets all about it. Even if the same remote user connects a few seconds later, from the server's point of view it's a completely new interaction and the script has to reconstruct the previous interaction's state. This makes even simple applications like shopping carts and multipage questionnaires a challenge to write.

CGI script developers have come up with a standard bag of tricks for overcoming this restriction. You can save state information inside the fields of fill-out forms, stuff it into the URI as additional path information, save it in a cookie, ferret it away in a server-side database, or rewrite the URI to include a session ID. In addition to these techniques, the Apache API allows you to maintain state by taking advantage of the persistence of the Apache process itself.

This chapter takes you on a tour of various techniques for maintaining state with the Apache API. In the process, it also shows you how to hook your pages up to relational databases using the Perl DBI library.