Saturday, April 21, 2007

cookies, session state, and rest (again)

now that i'm wrapping up my initial round of implementing a REST-ful web server coding pattern in C#, i am staring directly at the whole "cookies are nor REST" issue and working to resolve it as pragmatically as possible.



i even printed a copy of roy fielding's REST dissertation and amd working through that parts that contain his comments against cookies and session state.  on the surface, they make sense. basically cookies and session state can have the effect of controlling the way a URI is resolved (use the session state for filtering, the cookie for personalization of the page layout, etc). this means the resulting document can't be reliably cached or played back for other users (or possibly the same user). ok, i get that.



as a data bucket

so, my next round of thinking is *why* we got into the habit of using cookies and session state. first, they often are shortcuts - nothing more. i can stuff a value in a cookie and carry it around for a while (say, during a multi-page shopping experience) and then use it later. i can do this same thing using a server-side session bucket.  of course, the hitch on implementing server-side session state is that i need at least one cookie on the client to reliably link the client and the server session data.



as authentication

another common way to use cookies is to use them to handle authentication of a user. in other words, once a user presents credentials, a cookie is written to the client. then for every request, the server checks the cookie to make sure it's valid. you can even timeout the cookie to make sure users who leave their client unattended will eventually be 'de-authed.'



as an identifier

also, cookies are often used simply as an identifier. once a user logs in  (say using basic-auth or digest-auth), a cookie is created and passed to the client. this identifies the client for all susequent transactions. usually this is to help with tracking the user's actions on the site. sometimes the identifier is just a random value (commonly referred to as a session id) that is used purely for tracking purposes. it is then possible to playback a session using archives transactions kept on the server.



ok, data bucket, authentication, identifier...



auth not needed

i am working to use only basic-auth, and digest-auth for authentication. there is enough support in asp.net including httpmodules and the ability to access user and principal objects to make that all work consistently. i'm confident i don't need cookies for authentication. i just need to accept that the web pages will occassionally popup the 'rude' browser auth dialog<sigh>.



data bucket, i think i can deal with this

i understand the point, but need to noodle on this for a bit. some trival examples on the web invovle creating a we resource at a 'disposable' URL that a client can use as a data bucket during a session. i can see this working via ajax, but am not clear on how to implement it in a more traditional server-side html page environment. again with the 'composer' issue. i don't want to compose pages on the server that contain non-replayable, personalization, or private data that might end up in the cache. i need to work on it, but i can see the possibility.



identifier - i still think i need this

first, i've started implementing a simple session cookie that i use to track transactions in the session and to prevent simple replay issues ( i use some browser agent data as well as a random key). finally, i use a caching trick to timeout the sessino after x minutes of inactivity. by doing this, i can flip a flag in the code that will clear any personal data, start a new session, and force a new auth dialog (if needed). so i kinda really need that<g>.



second, while this random data helps me keep track of transactions by a client as well as timing out a client session, i still don't really know *who* this client is. for that, i think i need at least a 'friendly' name cookie or something.  not sure why i really need this, but i have a hard time letting this go.  the biggest thing that junps out is that, when using basic-auth, any non-authed pages are missing the auth data entirely. i suspect the same is true for digest-auth, but i'm not positive. so i think i need a 'name' cookie<sigh>.



as long as the session cookie and (if included) the name cookie are not used to control the content of the resource they are safe to use. it's only when state data is used to change the resource representation in 'hidden ways' that things are bad (non-cachable).



i think i need to check into ways to use caching controls to better track how a resource is dentified.



finally, i read a scary 'aside' while digging into this whole cookie-battle. it was regarding auth. something like 'tossing authenticate' headers around screws up third-party caching. hmmm... kinda makes sense. and is depressing.



ok, that's all for now. i'll soldier on.



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