Question

I would like to know what the opposite of a ‘stateless protocol’ is. Am I correct in assuming that, seeing as HTTP is stateless, for example, then a protocol such as FTP is the opposite/one that maintains state?

Thanks.

Answer 1

There are stateless protocols (like http) and stateful protocols (like ftp, telnet, …).

According to wikipedia :

In computing, a stateless protocol is a communications protocol that treats each request as an independent transaction that is unrelated to any previous request so that the communication consists of independent pairs of requests and responses. A stateless protocol does not require the server to retain session information or status about each communications partner for the duration of multiple requests.

According to this article – Stateful protocol :

The client connects to the server, conducts a series of operations via that conneciton, and then disconnects.Then server can associate all of the requests together and knows that thy all came from the same user.