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What is a rest session?
As per the REST (REpresentational “State” Transfer) architecture, the server does not store any state about the client session on the server-side. Session state is therefore kept entirely on the client. client is responsible for storing and handling all application state-related information on client side.
Can we maintain user session in Web services?
By default, web service does not support session state. For achieving high scalability, web service is designed stateless. Suppose the requirement is to use session management in a web service to retain user specific information, you need to use the session in your web service.
How are HTTP requests used in REST Web Services?
The HTTP requests are used in order to read and write data. The four methods which are GET, PUT, POST and DELETE are used in REST based web services. Therefore, the HTTP protocol is used by REST in order to perform the four operations which are create, read, update and delete (CRUD).
Is there a difference between rest and RESTful services?
While there are advantages to RESTful services, you should only follow the tenets of REST as far as they make sense for your application. That said, authentication and client side state do not violate REST principles. While REST requires that state transitions be stateless, this is referring to the server itself.
How does session handling work in RESTful Web Services?
If you really must have session handling in your API then the client would be responsible to handle the session_id and add it to the URL if required. How exactly to handle this would depend on your technology stack. For example Rails defaults to cookies but (if enabled) would also accept a _session_id parameter as part of the URL.
How does a web server know which session a request comes from?
I know that for a web application, the web server inspects the cookie (or the sessonId query parameter in case cookies are disabled) so it knows which session the request is associated with. But for a request that comes from a rest client, how do the server know?